OTHERS JOIN THE CHORUS FOR CHARITY TO ETHIOPIA

First came the British.

Then the Americans.

And now, with the creation this week of a chanting Spanish-language coalition calling itself Hermanos del Tercer Mundo (Brothers of the Third World), the Latinos have joined the Ethiopian charity chorus.

In fact, if the current pop music fad to sing for starving children continues, Africa may turn out to be the first continent in history to be saved by a song. Or, more to the point, a whole load of songs, covering just about every musical genre to hit the turntable since Nipper first listened to His Master’s Voice.

Country stars are putting out a “Nashville Home-Grown for Hunger” LP next month in the wake of the “We Are the World” success enjoyed by USA for Africa.

A coalition of Canadian pop stars, led by Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young, is reportedly doing its part on the upcoming album version of “We Are the World” by contributing a track entitled “Tears Are Not Enough.”

With the sudden explosion of Ethiopian famine music as a major entertainment sub-industry, can a reggae summit under the title “Rastafarians for Chad” be far behind?

As of Thursday, after two weeks in national release, 3 million copies of a 7-inch version of the “We Are the World” single (dealer cost: $1.73) and another half million of an extended-play 12-inch version (dealer cost: $4.48) had been sold, according to USA for Africa Foundation spokeswoman Wendy Ferris.

After retailers’ mark-up and sales tax, the 7-inch version sells for $2.11 at chain stores such as the Wherehouse. The foundation gets $1.40 of that, according to Ferris.

“We’ve received another $150,000 in direct contributions and $855,000 from merchandising,” Ferris said Tuesday.

Most of the merchandising profits come from USA for Africa sweatshirts that sell for $22.37.

“We get about 60% of that,” she said.

So far, the foundation has taken in $8 million in profit, and it projects that it will have $20 million by Easter.

In addition to a $2-million deal that the foundation recently closed with Home Box Office to air an hour-long “The Making of ‘We Are the World’ ” video in May, the foundation expects to get $1 per book for a 64-page photo book that Putnam is publishing the first week in April on the making of the record. Putnam is printing 200,000 copies and selling them for $5.98, Ferris said.

A 30-minute videocassette “which is not an edited-down version of the HBO program,” will be on the market by June, she said.

And the album that the foundation expects to be the biggest-selling item of all--”USA for Africa”--goes on sale next week. Dealer’s cost is $8.98 an album.

According to Hermanos’ co-producers, Jose Quintana and Albert Hammond, the Spanish-language equivalent of a USA for Africa ad-hoc grouping has already confirmed such Latino singing stars as Julio Iglesias, Placido Domingo, Jose Feliciano and Menudo. By the time all of them assemble at West Hollywood’s A & M Recording Studios in mid-April, their sing-along will include far more than the 45 American recording artists who gathered at those same studios Jan. 28 to record “We Are the World.”

“It’s a wonderful gift for the Latin people,” Hammond said, adding that by his estimate, there are 400 million Latino consumers in the world--30 million in the United States alone. The one major difference between the Hermanos effort and earlier Ethiopian hunger anthems is that only half the profits are earmarked for Africa. The other half will go to Latin America, which has its own well-publicized food and medicine needs.

“We’re not buying guns for Nicaragua,” Hammond said. “The war end of it is something the governments are going to have to take care of. We want to feed children.”

Peter Lopez, attorney for Hermanos, said that UNICEF or the Red Cross may be contacted to funnel funds to the countries that need them.

“We hope to make millions of dollars,” he said. “It just depends on how the world takes it.”

This latest charity single, scheduled for a May 1 release date, is tentatively to be called “Para Ti, Para Mi” (“For You, for Me”), according to Hammond. Recent Grammy winner Humberto Gatica, who co-engineered the “We Are the World” single, will co-produce “Para Ti, Para Mi” along with Hammond and Quintana.

Like “We Are the World,” the single will be included as a cut on an LP whose profits will also go to charity. Feliciano, as well as Latin singing stars Roberto Carlos and Emmanuel, has already committed to a solo track on the 14-cut album, Hammond said, adding that it will contain only previously unreleased material.

But unlike the “We Are the World” performers, the “Para Ti, Para Mi” recording artists will sing in both Spanish and English. Though Quintana and Hammond are convinced the single will skyrocket to the top of the Latin-American music charts the same way “We Are the World” has done on the Billboard Top 100, they also believe it stands a good chance of breaking into the mainstream of American pop music because of the broad appeal of such artists as Iglesias and Menudo.

“The British have all their artists on one record,” Hammond said, referring to the December release by a coalition of British pop stars who called themselves Band Aid and recorded the hit charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas.”

“Next, the Americans did theirs,” Hammond continued. “Now all the the Latino recording artists will be on one record.”

More than 200 Hermanos sweat shirts have been ordered for the singers. The co-producers expect to have every one of them filled by a musician, producer or band member. Along with the single and the LP, they plan to sell T-shirts, sweat shirts and other trinkets featuring the Hermanos logo: two brown hands reaching toward the red-lettered slogan, Hermanos del Tercer Mundo.

The initial outlay for the entire production will be about $300,000, Hammond said. That includes the cost of flying singers into Los Angeles and putting them up at a hotel until the recording session is finished--an expense Hammond puts at between $60,000 and $70,000.

In the USA for Africa mold, another $150,000 will be spent on production of a music video and an hourlong version about the making of the record, featuring narration by Ricardo Montalban, Hammond said. He added that the producers, singers, songwriters and A&M; owners Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert have all agreed to contribute their resources for free.

Alpert, who is best known as the creator andlead trumpet for the Tijuana Brass, has agreed to become one of the Hermanos during the April recording session.