Oxfam UK

Oxfam UK launched a new advertising campaign this week seeking to shift the focus to progress in Africa and away from 'depressing' images fostered by Live Aid and other well-intentioned efforts.

Twenty-seven years after Live Aid viscerally brought Africa's famine and poverty home to billions worldwide, the head of a major international charity warned Wednesday that the "depressing" stereotypes left in its wake were counterproductive and risked driving help away.

The British arm of Oxfam International called images of starving babies and other familiar depictions of Africa over the last quarter-century "manipulative and hopeless," desensitizing potential donors and leading them to the conclusion that conditions in the developing world can never improve. 

Oxfam launched a new advertising campaign this week celebrating Africa's natural beauty and progress toward alleviating hunger. Called "Food for All," the campaign features images of lush green scenery, wildlife and thriving African food markets.

The campaign's tagline: "Let's Make Africa Famous for Its Epic Landscapes, Not Hunger."

Dame Barbara Stocking, the British charity's chief executive, said in a posting on Oxfam's website that "we've come a long way since the 1980s and Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'"

But "we need to shrug off the old stereotypes and celebrate the continent's diversity and complexity," she contended.

Band Aid, the musical charity supergroup formed in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in response to the crippling famine in Ethiopia. In 2004, on the song's 20th-anniversary re-release, the World Development Movement condemned it as "patronizing, false and out of date."

Geldof and Ure organized the landmark fundraising concert Live Aid in 1985, bringing dire conditions in Africa front and center to people around the world.

"'Patronizing' isn't the word" to describe the message fostered by Band Aid and other well-intentioned campaigns, Stocking said Wednesday in an interview on Sky News. "It's just this negativity. ...

"In order for people to understand what's happening in Africa, we've also got to tell the good stories, and there has been good news in Africa," said Stocking, who is retiring in the new year after serving with the charity since 2001. 

"Otherwise, people just feel put off and (believe) there's nothing that can be done about Africa," she said. "And that's the big worry for us — that people feel it's all hopeless, when it clearly isn't."

World Bank statistics indicate that the world's heaviest concentration of malnutrition remains in Africa, afflicting as many as 15 percent of all children under 5 in some countries in the southern and eastern regions. And in June, the U.N. Children's Fund reported that 1.5 million children were at imminent risk of starvation in the western half of the continent.

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But while acknowledging that international aid has made few if any inroads on hunger, Oxfam said in a report this month that countries south of the Sahara Desert had made "one of the most remarkable turnarounds in development ... in the last decade." It called the 22 years from 1990 to 2011 an "African renaissance."

Oxfam: Africa is wide awake but still hungry (.pdf)

"Economies have been growing even in the face of economic and financial instability elsewhere in the world, poverty has fallen and child mortality has dropped considerably, among the most visible indicators of progress," the report said.

The real story, Stocking said Wednesday, is that "aid money is really working."

But in the end, she said, "we don't want to have to give aid money to Africa. We want economic development, enterprise — that's what we're really aiming to do."

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One-and-a-half-million children are in imminent danger of starvation in West Africa, according to The United Nations Children's Fund, despite recent pledges of international aid.

As world leaders gathered for the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, aid workers warned there were only four weeks left to treat the effects of acute hunger before the rainy season makes huge swathes of the Sahel region inaccessible.

Across western Africa, communities are caught between climate change, conflict and poverty -- yet the global economic crisis means international priorities lie elsewhere.

For example, during its financial crisis Greece has received a hundred times more from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than Niger during the last few years.

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In hospitals here in southern Niger, a crisis is developing. Many children are at serious risk of dying and for each bed there is a skeletal frame as yet another hunger crisis strikes.

Hair turned red by hunger
Patients include a girl, Amina, whose hair has turned red by a lifetime without enough food, and Ibrahim, an eight-month-old whose tiny body is consumed by the effects of severe malnutrition.

From many miles around, more young patients arrive all the time -- more work for the doctors who've rarely seen anything like this.

Women complain about a lack of rain, but also about a lack of food. Their families may not survive the coming months, they say.

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“What you’re looking at are communities across wide areas that need assistance because, despite best efforts, they have been pushed off their ability to cope,” said Martin Dawes, regional spokesman for UNICEF.

UNICEF Niger overview

Some help is here: The international response has been swifter than it has been in the past. Earlier this month, the United States pledged over $81 million in additional assistance.

But this is a crisis across many counties, affecting many millions, leaving many lives on a knife-edge – and the U.N. has already said it needs another $1.5 billion to tackle the problem.

The months ahead are crucial here, amid grim warnings about more dry weather, even an influx of locusts. The world has been warned.

Editor's note: Yahaman, the eight-month-old boy featured in our video report on the hunger crisis in Niger died late Tuesday night.

Rohit Kachroo is NBC News' Africa Correspondent. Additional editing by Alastair Jamieson, msnbc.com.

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A group of U.S. seed, chemical and equipment companies will invest at least $150 million over the next few years into African agricultural projects and products, the companies said on Friday. 

The investments pledged by DuPont, Monsanto, Cargill and others are part of an overall $3 billion effort by companies around the world announced by President Barack Obama.

Along with companies from India, Israel, Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom, and 20 companies from Africa, the corporations have committed some $3 billion for projects to help farmers in the developing world build local markets and improve productivity.

The United Nations has said that by 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water. Absent these resources, it said, up to 3 billion people would probably be condemned into poverty.

Capitalizing on food demand in Africa also holds strong profit potential, corporate leaders said.

"It has been a bit chaotic. There are all sorts of issues around the countries in Africa. But the population, the economic growth, the quality of many of the soils is there," DuPont Executive Vice President Jim Borel told Reuters in an interview. "The need is there, the potential is there."

"We're convinced we can take the base we have now, and accelerate that progress," said Borel, who oversees DuPont's food and nutrition businesses. Among DuPont's units is its Pioneer Hi-Bred International seed company, which has operated in Africa for decades.

India and China are more stable and growing faster, but Africa is "not far behind," according to Borel.

The push by global corporations to spend more money and develop new markets across Africa comes as an expanding world population and growing demand for quality food threaten to exceed existing limits of agricultural production.

Investors have been buying up farmland in Africa, hoping to make it more productive using modern agricultural technologies. That, combined with the rising interest of international agricultural corporations, has brought criticism.

Advocates for African farmers fear they will lose control over their food supply and markets. They say African farmers are being displaced and unsustainable farm practices are being introduced.

"The problem is all this is based on large-scale commercial agriculture," said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank. "Who does it benefit? All of these things are supporting the formation of large-scale commercial agriculture, which will hurt small farmers. They could spend far less but focus on providing credit facilities, ensuring open markets and ensuring the rights of small holder farmers." 

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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Ahead of this week's G8 summit at Camp David, Maryland, the musician and global poverty campaigner Bob Geldof has returned to Ethiopia to highlight the issue of famine and climate change – 28 years after his charity appeals first made world headlines.

The singer said G8 leaders have failed to adhere to aid targets set at the Gleneagles summit in 2005.

The G8 "is capable of contributing to end" poverty, he said.

He also acknowledged that people may have grown tired of his campaigning, but said even basic projects such as the irrigation ditch he was inspecting, saved lives. "I know people are like...'Oh, Geldof, give it a break' but the facts is these people [here] are not dead."

Geldof was one of the key figures behind the Band Aid fundraising music project, launched in 1984 after Ethiopia suffered a devastating famine.

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 Thousands of people needlessly died from famine in East Africa last year because the rich nations failed to act on early warnings, two leading British aid organizations reported Wednesday.

The report from Oxfam and Save the Children said a "culture of risk aversion" by humanitarian agencies and national governments caused a sixth month delay in large-scale aid effort. The groups said many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one.

ITN’s Rohit Kachroo saw firsthand the results of too little action. Kachroo reports from Mogadishu, Somalia, where "battlefields are disappearing only to reclaimed by a more deadly war against hunger. In the city, every patch of space is a new home for the thousands outside it."

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