Remember Live 8?

[StoneMtn]

Remember Live 8? Reviews mixed for charity stars

Fri Jul 15, 2005 2:09 PM BST

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters) - Remember Live 8?

Two weeks after Bob Geldof assembled the greatest rock-'n-roll lineup ever to pressure world leaders to alleviate poverty, people are questioning whether musicians and celebrities should do anything other than entertain.

Two Irish rockers, Geldof and U2 frontman Bono, rubbed shoulders with the world's most powerful men in Scotland during a summit earlier this month, calling for more aid and debt relief and prounouncing themselves satisfied with the outcome.

The Group of Eight agreed to double aid to poor countries by 2010, adding $50 billion a year, weeks after they reached a debt relief deal worth more than $40 billion.

"A great justice has been done," said Geldof. At the same time, ActionAid gave a less positive spin on the commitments: "The summit has failed to deliver justice for Africa."

The statements underline the complex relationship between celebrities and serious causes.

Aid groups are careful not to burn bridges with stars they know they need to attract media attention to a cause.

Yet they are also frustrated at what they see as celebrities' tendency to oversimplify issues and heap praise on leaders for deals that may not be quite what they seem.

"Aid agencies have common agendas, and individuals have their own agendas," said one aid group representative, who asked not to be named.

Make Poverty History, the charity umbrella group which works closely with Geldof, argued the G8 debt deal was a tenth of the amount needed and that less than half the promised aid increase was new money.

ActionAid also called the outcome on trade issues, allowing poor countries to compete easier on world markets, a "disaster" for Africa, where 60 percent of employment comes from small scale farming.

DID AMERICA LISTEN?

One of the most important questions for Live 8 organisers is whether the message on poverty got through to hundreds of millions of people who tuned in on the day.

Kevin Wall, the executive producer of Live 8, was upbeat, explaining that raising awareness of issues like African poverty in the United States takes time. He estimated around two billion people tuned to Live 8 on television, radio and the Internet.

"People are now becoming aware in America," he told Reuters. "It is not what it is in Britain, it never has been. We are at the beginning of a process.

"You mix the power of music with a message and it is very, very powerful."

Helen Palmer, a spokeswoman for charity Oxfam, was also confident the exercise had yielded results.

"It sort of upped the ante to an extra degree. It has played a major role in bringing the message to millions more people and you can't knock that," she said. It was now up to aid groups to sustain pressure on politicians.

But in America, the world's wealthiest nation, there is evidence to suggest the message struggled to get through.

"At this point, it's too early to tell just how big an impact Live 8 will have on its pet issue," Jonathan David Morris wrote in an opinion piece for a conservative American Web site.

"But I'm struck by how quickly it seems to have faded from memory ... a week after the concert, it's as if Live 8 never happened at all."

In Africa itself, there is also skepticism over G8 pledges.

Adekeye Adebajo, director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town, wrote in a commentary that farm subsidies in wealthy nations should be scrapped and the "dumping" of food on poor countries stopped.

"Otherwise, all the recent efforts of musicians, politicians and activists will turn out simply to have been much ado about nothing."

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2005-07-15T130857Z_01_HAR547322_RTRUKOC_0_GROUP-LIVE-8-IMPACT.xml

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I wish, in a way, I'd worked up enough enthusiasm about this whole thing to have been appropriately disappointed when it went fizz (maybe I'm being premature in saying that, but that's the feeling I've been working with); I figured the first few times this sort of thing had happened were enough to allow clever people the means to adequately exploit it whenever it came around again on a big enough scale - even if that exploitation consists of the lip-service idiots like Paul Martin pay to keep themselves looking better than bad (pace Hux).