Muammar Al Khadafi

Ethiopia is, yet again, suffering from famine and drought. In what seems to be a recurring theme every few years, Britain is to give them an additional £38million in aid to help them out.

We already give them a lot of money as is - according to the DFID website "We will spend an average of £331 million per year in Ethiopia until 2015".

Now, those pictures of starving children we always see do, of course, tug at the heart strings. Nobody likes to think of anyone suffering like that.

But, let's for a moment leave the emotive pictures behind, and take a little look at Ethiopia, and why our assistance is actually making their problems far worse.

The population is increasing steadily, from an estimated 51.7 million people in 1990 to its current level believed to be around 88 million people.

Figures from the World Bank put population growth in Ethiopia at between 2-3% year on year.

Despite repeated famines, the population increases year on year, further exacerbating future famines because, quite simply, there are more mouths to feed.

Well intentioned as western efforts may be, our aid is actually only serving to make sure that the problem grows worse, and is further exaggerated by the rapidly growing population which, in large part, continues to grow because of western intervention and aid.

Instead of assisting these countries to support themselves, we are actually creating a situation which will see all of their problems magnified. We paper over the cracks today, and ensure tomorrow will be a day when there are simply too many people to help, a crunch point where the population of a country has grown far beyond any realistic prospect of it ever being supported by that countries resources.

Total dependence on western aid ensues because a country, in this case Ethiopia, has absolutely no chance of averting disaster without western aid year on year. It simply has neither the resources nor the infrastructure to support its rapidly growing population.

Further to this, at some point will come a moment when even western aid is not enough. The disaster that we delayed will be far worse than ever, and utterly unmanageable.

All around the world we see the consequences of uncontrolled population growth, and, whether we mean to or not, we contribute to that and thus ensure that future problems will be all the more nightmarish.

Realistically we cannot help everyone forever. Cruel as it seems, those 10 mouths we feed today mean 50 mouths to feed in a few decades time, and a disaster of famine on a monstrous scale which no amount of aid can possibly prevent.

By helping countries that have no prospect of helping themselves, we only make their problems and the problems of their people worse.