Pope Begs Rich Countries to Give Africa More Help : Foreign aid: The pontiff believes the industrial world has a moral duty to share its wealth. He warns against ‘fratricidal indifference.’

In the keynote address of his African tour, Pope John Paul II appealed to the rich nations of the world Monday to provide more generous aid to the afflicted, have-not region of sub-Sahara Africa.

On the fifth day of an eight-day trip through some of the poorest countries on Earth, the Pope’s rhetoric was as powerful as his conviction that the wealthy nations of the Northern Hemisphere are not doing enough to counter Africa’s misery.

He was addressing aid workers and members of a foundation established in his name in 1984, principally through contributions by West German Catholics. It was the 10th anniversary of his first appeal here for aid to the Sahel, a region scourged by backwardness, drought and hunger in the relentless advance of the Sahara desert.

“In the name of justice,” he said, “the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, begs his brothers and sisters around the world not to scorn the hungry of this continent, not to deny them the universal right of human dignity and a secure life.

“How would history judge a generation that, having all the means to feed the Earth’s population, refuses to do so with fratricidal indifference? What peace could be hoped for by people who do not carry out the duty of solidarity? What a desert the world would be where misery is not met with life-giving love.”

The principal purpose of his visit to the Sahel, the Pope told reporters last week, was to remind the industrial world that the needs of Africa must be respected in the rush to aid the newly democratizing countries of East Europe.

And he said Monday: “Again, I must launch a solemn appeal to humanity in the name of humanity itself. The world must know that Africa suffers deep poverty. Available resources are declining, the Earth is becoming sparer across an immense area, malnutrition is chronic for tens of millions of people; too many children die. Is it possible that such a need is not felt by all humanity?”

His new appeal, John Paul said, “is directed to the peoples of the world, especially to those of the North who have most of the human and economic resources.”

Like the other countries John Paul is visiting in the pilgrimage, Burkina Faso--a landlocked, Colorado-size military dictatorship of 9 million people once known as Upper Volta--is mired in the backwardness of subsistence agriculture that is hostage to nature’s caprice.

Despite public and private foreign assistance, Burkina Faso’s standard of living has hardly improved since the Pope’s visit in 1980. The country has enjoyed two successive years of good rainfall in regions where drought is more common, but per-capita income is still only about $200 a year. Last year, abundant rain brought voracious swarms of grasshoppers and locusts to devour the crops.

Crowds of singing, dancing people lined the dusty roads of this capital to greet the Pope on a day when the air was so heavy with Sahara sand that the airport runway lights were switched on at noon to guide the papal aircraft.

The Pope also met President Blaise Compaore, an army captain who took power in a 1987 coup in which his predecessor, Thomas Sankara, was killed.

West European countries provide the lion’s share of economic assistance for Burkina Faso. The United States, eighth on the donor list, gave about $10 million last year, supporting development projects and the government’s family planning program. The Catholic Church opposes all such projects that promote artificial birth control.

The John Paul II Foundation for the Sahel, headquartered here, serves eight countries and has distributed about $3 million in aid, but Western diplomats here say its work is little known outside church circles.

Today John Paul flies to a provincial capital to conduct a Mass before continuing to Chad, the fifth and last stop of a pilgrimage that began in Cape Verde and continued through Guinea Bissau and Mali over the weekend.