Geldof woke us up 20 years ago, so why are more people starving now?

I WANT to get rich, famous and laid. Three modest (or immodest, depending on your point of view) enough ambitions, I suppose.

Certainly, they were the primary reasons given by a young man named Bob Geldof for getting involved in music.

He might have added - and I want to make a difference. He’s rich, he’s famous, and if he’s made it three out of three, that’s his own business.

But for just about 20 years, Bob Geldof has been better known as one of the most powerful and effective advocates for the developing world than as anything else. Last Friday he demonstrated why.

He was speaking in Dublin to an audience of bankers (“Just how I wanted to end my career,” he began wryly, “making after-dinner speeches to f***ing bankers”), and after one or two jokes at the expense of their profession, he launched into a passionate, no-holds-barred description of poverty and AIDS in Africa.

The 900 people present were spellbound, and some were in tears as he spoke quietly and passionately about the failure of politics to get to grips with an eminently solvable set of problems.

He spelled it out in stark and simple terms. Growth in the world’s economy - in part of the world’s economy - has meant that the unsustainable gap between rich and poor in the world has become even wider.

The irony is that the more we are in a position to solve the problem, the bigger it gets. Malnutrition, AIDS, violence, oppression of women, exploitation of children, illiteracy are a daily reality for millions of people in the world. For many more of us, second holidays, second homes, second cars are becoming the bare necessities of life.

Perhaps it’s our consumerism, our need to keep acquiring more and more that makes us blind to the choices made on our behalf where the developing world is concerned. Because we shouldn’t be under any illusion about this. Unfair trade works to our benefit, at least in the short term. Relieving the huge financial burden of debt that is crippling the developing world might require us to make a tiny sacrifice (and it would be tiny). The mismanagement of aid to the developing world, and the miserly decisions made about it, are made on our behalf.

Choices, in other words. There are three great issues to be resolved if the relationship between us and the developing world is ever to be placed on any kind of a just and fair footing - a level playing field, as the bankers might say. Trade, debt and aid. And now is the time to address those issues. The rich world is richer than it has ever been.

If most or all of the debts of the developing world were wiped out, we would barely notice the impact on us. If the necessary investment was made in the education and treatment programmes required by the spread of AIDS, the cost of supporting that would be miniscule on a per capita basis. And in some parts of Africa, the current generation has already been doomed by AIDS. Education and treatment is essentially about saving the next generation.

Back in 2001, at the ill-fated Genoa summit of the G8 (the eight most powerful and advanced countries on the planet), all these issues were on the agenda. That was a summit marked by disaster, as protesters clashed with heavily armed police, with fatal consequences. But it was also a summit marked by promises on behalf of the world’s rich (us) to the world’s poor (them). If all those promises had been kept we’d be well on the way already to a visible reduction of world poverty, and to a narrowing of the gap between us and them. In the last four years, neither of these things has happened.

What did happen, of course, was 9/11 and the subsequent war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, and the preoccupation of the developed world with our own safety. Issues like world poverty slipped down the agenda, while world paranoia crept to the top. Three thousand people died in the Twin Towers. Nine times that number of children die every day, every single day, in conditions of extreme poverty throughout the world. That’s right - 28,000 children die from poverty-related causes every day.

Throughout the world, 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day. Eight hundred million people go to bed hungry every day. They’re United Nations statistics, from a report that refers in its preface to the “uneven distribution” of resources in the world.

Some uneven distribution! A world full of more expensive and extensive consumerism than at any time its history, a world that is engaged in an orgy of consumerism to an extent that was unimaginable 50 or 40 or 30 years ago. And one in every eight of us goes to bed hungry every night.

Bob Geldof knows all these figures. As he talked last Friday about the conditions he had seen in the world, conditions he said that no human being should ever have to see, his voice never rose. Indeed, he occasionally broke through the tension of what he was describing with a joke or an irreverent remark. But you could see, nevertheless, the anger in him at the things he was talking about.

And part of that anger, I suspect, is that in mid-summer this year the world, and especially the world’s media, will all go mad celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Live Aid concert. What a day that was, the day that world consciousness about poverty and hunger was at an all-time high, the day we all made good resolutions (while we were drinking beer and singing along with Status Quo) about how things would never be the same again.

Twenty years later, things aren’t the same again. They’re worse. Worse because of the basic conditions, and worse again because we can afford to change these conditions.

Not us, you’re saying. This is an issue that only the world can solve, or the EU, or someone else. Not us on our own.

Of course not. We can’t solve all the problems of the world, and God knows every time people in Ireland are asked they do their best. But what we can’t ignore is the broken promises.

Ireland has promised, solemnly and faithfully, to reach the UN target that we would commit 0.7% of our national wealth to aid to the developing world. The Taoiseach, campaigning for support so that Ireland could become a member of the UN security council, stated unequivocally that we would reach the target by 2007.

Our commitment was appreciated throughout Africa. But shortly after they voted us on to the security council, we announced that we wouldn’t be keeping that promise. Because our economy is growing so fast, the amounts necessary to keep the promise are bigger than they would otherwise have been. In other words, there was a time we were too poor to keep our promises. Now, we’re too rich.