Band Aid released their record 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' on November 29, 1984. Bob Geldof was said had spent 10 frantic days trying to bring together all the musicians to perform the song in one day. Sting made the comment at the time, "This is going to raise enough money to mean something (East African famine) but it’s a statement as well. We’re hoping for a No. 1 record for Christmas."
"Famine," it was pointed out, "even the word sounds a little old-fashioned, like something in a book. It doesn't carry much emotional charge if you read it when your stomach is comfortably full. To begin to appreciate what it means, you need to skip a few meals."
"Hunger," it was explained, "has a variety of forms: malnutrition, or lack of proteins, minerals and vitamins. Undernutrition, or just not enough of any food, and starvation." It was reported, "In the world, chronic malnutrition, rather than famine or starvation, was singled out as the major world hunger problem today. The central cause was identified as poverty."
In July 1986, Brian Walker former head of Oxfam told Congress, "It is entirely possible that within a century all people will be starving, not just the teeming millions of Asia or Africa, but all of us."
Food crisis had been described as "the biggest, most fundamental and most nearly insoluble problem that has ever confronted the human race."
In 1975, the Food and Agricultural Organization expressed, "There are grounds for hope that, with some further effort, the gap in the grain import requirements of the most seriously affected countries which loomed so large in November (1975) may be covered. The fact that this is a possibility at all is, to me, the first break in the dark clouds that have hung over the immediate world food situation in the last few years."
However at that time it was stressed, "Many of the developing countries urgently need to give a higher priority to improving and modernizing their own production and distribution of food. The overwhelming majority of those who till the soil still use the primitive methods of their ancestors.”
Human survival was said "depends on a series of fragile and delicately balanced systems." In 1986, it was suggested, "Two bad successive harvests in North America, Europe and Russia would destabilize the world food system. Despite our apparent affluence, we tread a narrow path between food security and starvation."
The House Select Committee on Hunger Mickey Leland acknowledged, "We can see famine being created. We can envision a repeat of the horrible suffering of the children of Ethiopia and the Sudan. Bankruptcy in America’s farm industry and Europe’s gross overproduction are part of the same phenomenon as famine in the Third World. Sooner or later, those problems we are seeing in Asia and Africa will catch up with us, as surely as night follows the day."
Food crisis would be "the most colossal catastrophe in history" because "the mathematics of violence is all too clear." It was argued, "We have the skills and the scientific knowledge. What we need is the will."
