WHAT’S NEXT AFTER AFRICA AND THE USA? SOUTH AMERICA

Why just USA for Africa? Why not Hands Across America--a kind of USA for the USA? And, after that’s all wrapped up next Sunday afternoon . . . why not move on to USA for South America?

“Belafonte says that South America is on the verge of crisis,” said Ken Kragen.

During a lunch break last week, Kragen, who co-founded the USA for Africa Foundation 18 months ago with singer Harry Belafonte, paused long enough during his chocolate Tofutti at a Westwood health food restaurant to reflect on starving South Americans.

The pop charity impresario has made it his business, after all, to stay one step ahead of the national charitable mood, and South American famine sounds as if it has the right elements: It skirts touchy questions like Arab terrorism or South African apartheid. It’s in our hemisphere. It involves children.

Best of all, it directly addresses the true and basic (and enormous) mission of USA for Africa: to end world hunger by the year 2000.

“What’s happening in Africa could happen in South America,” Kragen said. “That’s the next big problem.”

Contrary to the frenetic pace that he’s been setting these past weeks at Hands Across America rallies from Atlanta to St. Louis to UCLA, Kragen is not totally preoccupied with next Sunday’s extravaganza. For a man of his restless temperament, there must always be that next big thing.

Maybe Bolivian children will be in the famine focus of 1987, just as Ethiopian infants were in 1985. In the USA for Africa scheme of things, each year seems to have its new cause.

“In a way, it’s the way I manage acts,” he said. “You go the direction the performer is best suited for.”

In 1986, he figured that America was best suited for a domestic charity pitch. This was long before he knew that Libyan terrorism might make Africa a public relations hard-sell. But he pleads that he hasn’t forgotten his foundation’s original purpose.

For example, a USA for Africa Foundation entourage recently returned from a month in Africa. The group, headed by Operation California’s Richard Walden, was dispatched to see how the “We Are the World” album royalties were being spent on road rebuilding in the Sudan, rehabilitation projects in Ethiopia and bridge repairs in Chad.

The Walden expedition was all but ignored in the press, even though the foundation’s board of directors voted two weeks ago to hire two new full-time employees as a direct result of the trip. The two new monitors will make frequent trips to Sudan, Ethiopia and other drought-stricken African countries. It may go unheralded in the media, but massive starvation remains a major threat in East Africa, according to recent reports from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees.

When Kragen, Belafonte, Marlon Jackson and other USA for Africa officials visited East Africa in June, the trip was given massive TV and press coverage. It became the meat of a prime-time CBS special.

But African famine was a hot issue then, Kragen said. USA for Africa hasn’t forgotten about Africa, he insisted. It’s just that USA for Africa’s brand of altruism is, as Kragen explains it, a kind of constructive opportunism and opportunity is knocking at the door of America’s Skid Row, not in Africa.

Last fall, the USA for Africa board of directors toyed with the idea of giving half the Hands Across America largess to African relief, but Kragen successfully overrode those sentiments.

Even as early as last August, he could sense a shift in America’s generous mood away from Africa: “If you tried to sell a confused message right now--’This goes to Africa; this goes to America’--you’d find a big segment of the population who’d say, ‘Hey, we did a lot for them already. What about us?’ ”

So the United States will get 100% of the Hands Across America earnings next Sunday. After about $12 million in expenses, including $3 million for liability insurance premiums, USA for Africa hopes to net $50 million. USA for Africa officials said that 60% of it will be spent immediately in soup kitchens, health clinics and midnight missions coast to coast. The remainder will be given out in long-term development grants for such programs as unemployment rehabilitation and low-cost housing.

Eventually the spotlight will turn back to Africa--but not soon, Kragen said.

Irish rocker Bob Geldof, the other pop charity star to emerge from 1985, represents what happens when a promoter does not shift with public opinion from cause to cause. The founder of Band Aid has kept his focus on African need in 1986, but his Sport Aid follow-up to last year’s Live Aid success has received scant media attention in this country. Just last week, Geldof announced that his Band Aid/Live Aid Trust, which has raised more than $100 million for African famine relief, will dissolve in December.

Geldof’s event this year involves simultaneous 10 kilometer running events in more than 20 countries on the same next Sunday. Participants pledge $10 each for a “Race Against Time” T-shirt and the right to run in a Sport Aid 10K. In the United States, the 10K races will be run in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, New York, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle.

Said Kragen, “It’ll be curious to see how Sport Aid does because the Africa crisis was hot when there were pictures of kids on television.”

Bag ladies and families that live in phone booths are “hot” now.

“With a project, rather than try to swim upstream with it against a national trend, you should take it in another way. Then you continue to produce momentum. In this case (Hands Across America), it’s Americans for Americans.”

Kragen obviously is concerned over gaps in his chain, what with him trying to fill 5,842,641 spots in “The Line,” as it has come to be semi-affectionately known by his 350 full-time “Hands” hired hands. People are supposed to plunk down $10, $25 or $35 at their nearest Ticketmaster dealers for the privilege of linking up in the Long Island to Long Beach line.

But with an estimated 1.5 million pairs of hands signed up at midweek, Kragen began opening The Line to non-payers: “The last few days, I think the whole message is going to be just come, whether you’re signed up or not.”

These days Kragen finds himself quoting Albert Schweitzer and Robert Kennedy more often than the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But Kragen has no intention of making the great leap from anti-famine showmanship to political office.

“I’m better off where I am,” he said. “The entertainment industry has more influence generally and can do more with celebrities and so on than politicians. Secondly, monetarily, it’s one of the best industries, not only to live a good life but to be able to do things I would otherwise never be able to do. I’d never be able to do any of this if I were struggling to make a living.”

He has a good time, makes a lot of money and uses the mighty mystical impact of TV, celebrity worship and rock ‘n’ roll to get his views across to the masses.

“In Congress, even in the presidency, you’re very visible, constantly criticized, constantly under observation and financially, forget it,” he said.

As long as he’s calling the shots, he said that he sees no reason not to keep the USA for Africa ball rolling after Hands Across America is unclasped.

For the most part, he’s already working on the Hands Aftermath.

There’s a Hands book, for example, to be published by Simon & Schuster. There will be a Hands film, suitable for TV network licensing. There’s an invaluable mailing list comprising names and addresses of all those generous souls who signed up for Hands Across America, a mailing list to which selected charitable organizations may well be privy, Kragen said.

A mailing list that many a politician would dearly love to lay hands upon.

And autumn will come and with it plans for the next project--the surprise for 1987. Will the human salvage possibilities in South America be next?