Ever so slightly misguided

There's something ever so slightly misguided about using one's status to promote the worthy causes of the day.

People always buy charity records in droves, not to listen to them, but to ease their consciences, and will even feel compelled to make donations to Save the Eskimos or Executive Relief or Arms to Iraq or whatever, if they see respected TV personality Frank Windsor launching an appeal.

But for the celebrities standing in front of a camera, or behind a microphone, piling on the saccharine, and saving a million Ethiopian lives with their blatant commercialism, the consequences often prove rather grim, however good the idea seemed at the time.

How many non-charity singles has Bob Geldof released since Do they know it's Christmas? Why is Lenny Henry's role in Comic Relief always restricted to that same old sketch with the skinny black youths and the flies? The truth is that a reputation for effectively selling guilt to the nation's conscience is extremely difficult to shed, and marks the end of any normal career. I mean, Geldof was a pop superstar in the early 80's, right?

So it is with some trepidation that I raise the subject of the Yap-Yap 2002 appeal as I don't want to be seen as the latest charity envoy.

The Congo

Back in 1995, the horticulturist and paedophile Dr. Gregory Lyre Ph.D (I think I got that right) was successful in raising over £500,000 in the UK to save the Zairean Yap-Yap tree from extinction by transplanting a number of baby trees or Yaplings from the Congo to the South-West of England.

And now the trees have grown up, more money is required to tranport them back to their natural home.

The Yap-Yap Tree

The evergreen Yap-Yap tree is indigenous to Congo, and for hundreds of years has been sacred to the Zairean Bember people. The fruit, known as the Youp, is a staple foodstuff that resembles a small melon, and is, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, 'satisfying and delicious', while inside the bark or 'Yabbas', can be found a sticky resin known as Yallabanka: A substance which, when dried in the sun, forms a highly resiliant latex substitute, used by the tribe as a contraceptive.

Yap-Yaps take over 400 years to reach their full height - they can grow to 100 or 200 feet tall - and the extent of the roots means that they cannot be grown together in close proximity; a single tree requires an acre of glebe land, hence their relative scarcity.

Yield

Incidentally, the Yallabanka from a single Yap-Yap tree is worth about £4000, whereas an annual yield of youps may only sell for the Zairean equivalent of a few pence. The trees are therefore perceived to be of greater value when cut down, and therein lay the source of the original problem.

By the 1990s, the species had almost died out, and so it was up to wealthier countries like Britain and the USA to step in and keep the tree alive.

And thanks to your money, the original Project Yap-Yap proved to be successful, critical to the survival of the tree even, as similiar projects in Florida and California both failed. But the growing Yaplings cannot remain in their giant individual greenhouses in Torbay forever.

Dr. Lyre is an expert in his field, and has decided that now is the time to uproot them, and take them all back to Africa, at an anticipated cost of £1.2 million. Which is where you come in.

Further spending will be required on an extensive education programme for the Bember people, teaching them the true value of their horticultural heritage, reducing the tree-felling to a maintainable level in the future, and encouraging them to abandon Yallabanka sheaths in favour of the cap, coil or rhythm method.

So please, dig deep, and give whatever you can. For nature comes at a price.