The comments made by Ed Sheeran (Ed Sheeran: I wish I wasn’t on 40th-anniversary version of Band Aid, 18 November), reflect the continuing confusion between “aid” and “development”. Band Aid was a terrific way to raise funds and public engagement to relieve the appalling starvation that affected Ethiopia (where I was most marginally involved) and other parts of Africa in 1985, after almost six years of drought and a vicious military government. “Development” is a much longer-term programme of prevention and nurturing the capacity of local people to look after themselves. The “aid” agencies, by constantly emphasising the need to relieve starvation, are benefiting from donations, but removing agency from local people. The global economic framework is preventing poor countries from using their own tools to develop. It therefore makes international NGOs and the World Food Programme the arbiters of who lives and who dies. Hunger is, as usual, a weapon of war. I try to explain the politics of aid in Toxic Aid, described on our website.
Benny Dembitzer
Grassroots Malawi
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