Faith & Reason: We can no longer escape Africa's call for justice

It was 20 years ago this month that the first reports began to reach the British public of a famine in Ethiopia. Some 30 million people were suffering and dying in a terrible drought that swept across Africa. It was an event so shocking, with children dying on our television screens before our very eyes, that it seared the conscience of the nation, and indeed of the world.

It was 20 years ago this month that the first reports began to reach the British public of a famine in Ethiopia. Some 30 million people were suffering and dying in a terrible drought that swept across Africa. It was an event so shocking, with children dying on our television screens before our very eyes, that it seared the conscience of the nation, and indeed of the world.

The result was Live Aid, an event which united a billion and a half people in raising over $100m, the most ever been collected for charity by one event. It was the biggest shared experience in human history.

For me it was the start of five years of reporting from across Africa and, when I returned, another decade of involvement in the running of a variety of Third World charities and development agencies. Perhaps because it had begun in Ethiopia, a land which was deeply Christian long before the faith reached these islands, the problems of Africa were always seen through a religious lens.

I began to think about wealth and debt in the Bible, from the early Israelites, whose attitudes to prosperity involved the collective good of the whole people, to St Paul who insisted that the notion of equality should play an important part in giving. Both the Old and New Testaments lay stress upon sharing with fairness rather than simply the absolute relief of poverty. Justice and not charity should be the main motor to produce shalom, which we translate, somewhat inadequately, as "peace" but which also encompasses harmony, health, well-being and prosperity.

The problem is not with Christianity but how Christians have responded to it. Calvin said that the chief end of man was to glorify God and that in the everyday world this meant good disciplined work. His emphasis on stewardship and thrift led to saving, to accumulation, to investment - and thence to the development of merchant capitalism. In England John Wesley enjoined his flock to "gain all you can, save all you can and give all you can". But it is the fate of radicals that their message is heard only incompletely. Many of Wesley's followers were happy enough to obey the first and second of his injunctions but were less eager to observe the third.

In any case, all this had another legacy. It left decisions on social ethics entirely to the conscience of individuals. There was no real sense of the corporate structures within which the getting and saving takes place - "structures of sin" as liberation theology cam to call them - or of corporate responsibility in distributing wealth.

What Live Aid showed was that, in essence, the nature of our charitable response had not altered since Wesley's day. Admirable though it was, the vast outpouring of money from a new generation, in response to Bob Geldof's rude appeals for cash in 1985, was rooted still in the individualist notion of charitable generosity rather than a realisation of the need for structural change to usher in a more just system.

Live Aid alleviated the problems of the moment but did nothing to address the complex web of international trade rules, tariffs and quotas through which the rich nations tax the world's poorest peoples. It ignored the fact that we take far more from the poor than we give them; for every dollar we give in aid, we demand two dollars from the poor through unfair trade. It knew little of the systemic anti-poor bias of international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. It disregarded the problem of EU and US farm support policies, which mean that every cow in Europe receives $2.50 per day in subsidies - double what the average African earns. As I noted not long afterwards in my book Bad Samaritans: First World ethics and Third World debt: "Geldof, for all his skill as a populist, found no way of moving the issue on from one of charity to one of justice."

Books like that played a part in building a new consciousness among the members of the rich world's churches, creating the climate in which could flourish a justice movement like the Jubilee 2000 debt-relief campaign. But it has not proved enough. Twenty years on, after an era of globalisation and economic growth, Africa is actually worse off - the only place in the world to be so.

Alarm at that is what led Bob Geldof, after his last visit to Africa, to prompt Tony Blair to launch his Commission for Africa, to which I am about to be seconded from The Independent for six months. It aims to produce the 21st-century equivalent of the Brandt Report which defined relations between North and South in the Cold War era.

But that document suggested that enlightened self-interest would be enough to make the rich come to the aid of the world's poor. It did not work. Instead the imbalances are greater. What the Blair Commission must do - in addition to examining the obstacles of trade, debt corruption and conflict - is to address the need for justice - a justice that will permanently alter the future of the people of Africa.