Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the author of Red Tears, said this is perhaps the greatest scar of the Ethiopian famine.

We have to drain the sea, or if we cannot completely drain it, we must bring it to a level where they will lack room to move at will, and their movements will be easily restricted. The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton. A quarter of a century on, we’re still arguing about the roots of the problem, let alone the solution, and—though there has been progress—Ethiopia’s food insecurity gets worse, not better. Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy.One of the reasons the movie is such a hit is that it has not one but two hilarious scenes featuring one of the greatest Christmas Songs ever written: “Do They Know It’s Christmas. It fundamentally altered the rich world’s sense of its responsibility to the hungry and the poor, but didn’t solve anything,” Buerk wrote in the forward to Gill’s book.

It turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance was the easy part. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co. Just how little was solved by the outpouring of wealth and compassion for the Ethiopian famine is surely part of its legacy.Gill said perhaps the most obvious consequence of the Band Aid campaign was that Ethiopia became a sort of caricature of poverty and starvation in the minds of westerners. Giving is good and can help those in need, especially when combined with prudence—but it is not an end in itself.

Few understand this better than Michael Buerk, the BBC journalist whose report so moved Geldof on that chilly October night in 1984. I didn’t really know what the song was about, but I vaguely remember thinking it had something to do with AIDS, which was new and very scary.This formula—peace and expanding economic freedom—has the power to transform Ethiopia like no amount of humanitarian aid can. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part.