Remember Live Aid back in 1985? You know the big concert organised by Bob Geldof to help the millions starving in Ethiopia 1983-85 in a famine that cost a million lives?   Well, the music artists might have moved on but there is still plenty of hunger in Africa.

In fact Southern Africa, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi are in the middle of a thumping drought.  The fact Africa can’t feed itself means when drought comes, people go from hungry to starving overnight.

Africa spends 85 billion USD annually on food imports, of which 15 per cent is for wheat alone and this figure, thanks to the efforts of the mad green movement in Europe, is set to grow.

Now Africa has long blamed the West, and in particular the Europeans, for their plight, and in the story I’m about to tell you, they have plenty to get angry about.

There are a lot of countries in Africa, 54 at last count, but that number, like the total population, is constantly growing over time as nations implode and break apart.

Now when they are not fighting each other, they are great lovers. In fact so good that the population is around that of India at 1.5 billion and growing rapidly, expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050.

The big populations include Nigeria at 223m, Ethiopia (thanks in part to Bob Geldof) at 115 million and Egypt at 112 million, but none are big grain growers.

Nigeria produces around 20m tonnes of maize and sorghum a year, Egypt 10 million tn of wheat and Ethiopia around 5 million tonnes also of wheat. Not big by our numbers, but they can grow grain and in fact could grow a lot more.

Unsurprisingly, they eat the lot and then have to import from countries like Australia.  Good for us, not so good for them. 

Contrary to what many people believe, Africa has some seriously good agricultural land with Ethiopia being God’s gift to farming with its highly productive high land country.  Staggeringly beautiful and well worth a visit. 

Unfortunately, Ethiopia is prone to thumping droughts in the desert lands of the east and south, but those that can recall the mass starvation of the 1970s and 80s might also recall the mad socialist governments of Haile Selassie and the lunatic that followed, who systematically destroyed the economy.

The Europeans were not only responsible for exporting colonialism, they also exported the worst of their political systems, starting with socialism.

Africa’s poor agricultural performance is a direct result of some of the mad left wing policies that come out of Europe which continue to hold back Africa’s development.

While the US, Europe, and Asia have dumped their socialist economic theories and been busy cranking up their grain productivity, Africa has fallen far behind.

For example the USA averages 11 tn/ha of maize, Europe 7, Asia 6 while Africa staggers around at just 2tn/ha. Rice sits at USA 9 tn/ha, Europe 4, Asia 5 and Africa again just 2.

Allowing for soils, rainfall and temperature the one big difference is the use of fertiliser. On average, Africa applies just 26 kg/ha of NPK while Asia pumps on Asia 187 kg, the Americas 150kg and the EU 135kg.

Now those who have been captured by the climate change religion will be excited to know how small the carbon footprint of the average African farm is, but they might not be so interested in the fact that 282 million Africans or 1 in 6 are classified as malnourished.

When countries can’t afford to import grain from the likes of Australia, then the only alternative is to grow it in-country, but when you have friends like the European Greens influencing the European Union, then good luck getting the financing needed to build fertiliser plants to capitalise on the cheap gas being found across Africa.

A case in point is back in June 2022 when the European Commission blocked an initiative to provide financial support for the construction of new fertiliser production plants in Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the commission, the initiative would run counter to the EU’s climate and energy commitments.

Later in the year, the European Commission offered 4.5 billion euros in grants to Africa for food aid – helpful charity that does nothing to enable Africa to grow its own food -and investments in next-generation fertilisers.

The solution seems to be the ‘regen’ logic of ‘let them eat organic’. The only problem is Sri Lanka recently tried that and half their population went hungry.

It seems the Europeans have replaced imperial colonialism with green colonialism, something that is cheered on by the new elites of the Western left.

The fact that they can’t see the hypocrisy of their views and show no compassion for the implications of their climate change zealotry should make people stop and think.

Where are the artistic crowd when you need them? Maybe its time to bring Bob back to the stage. But then again, the artistic elite seem to have lost interest in the hungry long ago when they discovered climate change.