"I get fascinated by the oxymoron of the economics of poverty, it's a zero sum game, and I get caught up in the meetings and the politics, and then you go back to Africa and you're sitting in a little town and you think this is bullshit," colourfully exclaims Bob Geldof, KBE, during his speech at the 'Making a Difference' seminar organised by the Helsingin Sanomat and the children's charity organisation Plan Finland in Helsinki earlier this month.

Geldof admits that he talks empirically about many aspects of poverty passionately believing that he knows how to resolve these issues, "I'm sure it's not as clear as the way I see it, but it can be," and he then asked, "Why do we always hear about women and children? Why not the poor men of the world who are given no status and no future? It is a terrible cliché that children are our future, but what other option do we have? We don't even have to say that children are our future. We look at children and we see innocence worth fighting for."

"We talk about the idea of rights, but that's a western idea. There are many, many, many parts of the world that don't accept that idea at all and they have very logical, philosophical reasons that they don't. We have to acknowledge this and work around it. Sometimes we confuse our culture with universal values, sometimes we say that human rights are a universal absolute, maybe they may turn out to be parochial values; they may only exist in the culture we developed. We have problems when we insist on our way of thinking, when we bomb our way into democracy, when we insist on this political system that is based on notion of rights, when we insist on it. When a culture may have no understanding of it, when their economy doesn't support it.

"I will fight, literally until I die, for those values. If somebody tried to take them from me I would fight, but does everyone feel that and that's the problem. The answer is no they don't, so we have to consider that when we rare discussing the problems that are discussed already, and what was discussed wasn't just the notion of children or just women or just men, what was discussed was not the problem of rights, what has been discussed is the singular and unnecessary condition of poverty, which in the globalised world is completely ridiculous.

"It is an economic absurdity, which threatens us, and is morally repulsive. You can have human rights and be chronically poor, you can be very wealthy and not believe in human rights. We can't package our values when we are taking the temperature of the world's children, we can't do that. What we can do is attack at its source the problem of poverty and we can achieve it. Poverty is empirical, all other notions need to be arrived at, we arrived a democracy after a logical period of economical development. It didn't come first.

"When we reached a mean, an average level, of well-being we then said we want to decide who rules us. It is happening in China, you can see this in progress. You can see the city states making their own way, it is a weird hybrid, it is a sort of democratic capitalism. It may work, it might not for the Chinese, we don't know if the Chinese economy will succeed, we do know that this year China will take one percent of its population out of extreme poverty – not because of human rights, not because of democracy, but because of trade.

"Don't mistake me. Don't think I'm saying that rights should dismissed or that they are wrong. Don't mistake me when I say that I don't think the voice of the people is the only legitimate reason for rule – I agree with all of those values. What I am saying is let's not confuse the two or three issues

"Non-government organisation are not big enough, the Red Cross, a giant, is not big enough. UNICEF, a giant, is not big enough. You can only deal with the symptoms. I know this, the Band Aid Trust has been doing this for twenty-five years, tiny compared to UNICEF and Red Cross, possibly even Plan, so we deal with it and we build the schools. How many schools has Plan built throughout the world? Hundreds? We need millions! You want to know the condition of the world's children? It's shit! There's the result, we can all go home, we've taken the temperature: awful, a disgrace.

"In fact, the temperature of the world's people is shit. We are very lucky. We live in the lucky part of the world. We don't have to feel guilt; we struggle and we struggled hard in Finland and Ireland to get to this point. We went through an economic revolution in 50 years. Finland went through it very quickly coming out in the '70s with your recessions, we were the same.

"I was reading an article by a Finnish professor on the plane and he talked about the ethics of dignity. We deny dignity to 75% of this planet. We cannot sustain that because they will fight for their human dignity. We can tell them they have rights, we can tell them they should vote, but what they fight for is their right of dignity as a human being, which is what we encode in our notion of human rights.

"It is not a law, we can't insist, we can't bomb them to accept it, but if you say, "This is your dignity." One definition of poverty is the denial of human potential – all the Einsteins, all the Picassos, all the Beethovens, millions of them out there denied and we won't hear them, we won't see the painting, we won't appreciate the genius, because they are dying by the age of ten, by the age of sixteen.

"Tonight, like every night, 90% of the children of Africa will go to bed hungry again because it happened last night and it will happen tomorrow night. Hungry, it is ridiculous even saying that to me, and I say it a lot, but every time I say it I am struck by how ridiculous that is. We live in a world of surplus, to die of want in a world of surplus is not only intellectually absurd, but also morally repulsive. Globalisation has created even more surplus, which is fantastic. Look at the Chinese sucking one percent out of poverty, India is on the track to do the same, Brazil, Mexico, but one continent, uniquely, is left out of the economic basket. Why?

"I asked Tony Blair to examine the why in the year 2003. There must be reasons why this happens. Let's stop all this 'it's this' and 'it's that', let's look and examine it. We did the Commission for Africa, which became the plan for the British G8 held at Gleneagles, but why I should be interested comes from my own relative poverty and the fact that I had no choices. I was reading and listening to this music and, with my self-pity, I thought things could change… I just thought that you don't have to accept what you are told or what you are given. You must be able to change the circumstances of your life – I could, I was from Ireland, but they can't."