Europe and Africa: Towards a New Relationship - Webinar Address by President Michael D. Higgins to the Institute of International and European Affairs
Áras an Uachtaráin, 10 June 2020
A chairde,
I am delighted to be with you all today, even if it is to be in a virtual sense, to address the important topic of how we might pursue the most fruitful relations between Africa and the EU, how Europe might release itself from the narrative of the past and be part of a narrative of hope, be engaging as equals with our planet’s neighbouring continent of the young.
This is a topic on which I, as President of Ireland, have spoken on several occasions, a topic about which I feel passionately, for the quality of the European Union’s relationship with the continent of Africa and its people is a subject of such great importance, a topic which carries hope in its transformative potential for so many, yes for Africa, but also all of us as we seek to address the issues of our time, including the dysfunctional balance of economy, society, culture and, most importantly, ecology and the loss of biodiversity.
May I first thank the Institute for International and European Affairs for the invitation to address you, and compliment the Institute which has, in recent years, become such a critical resource for sharing ideas and evidence that are helping to influence policy at European and global levels.
Misconceptions of Africa
We have now the gift of new empirically based research published on Africa. For Europeans the issue is do we read it, respond to it, allow it to influence policy and our EU-Africa relationships and Agreements.
For example, the subtitle Carlos Lopes and George Kararach gave to their recent (2020) valuable work, Sustainable Change in Africa, is “Misperceptions, New Narratives and Development in the 21st Century”. I was struck by something most basic when I first read the book. It was how the Mercator projection has suggested to generations of Europeans that the continent of Africa is about the same size as Greenland. Greenland is in fact 14 times smaller. “Mercator’s 1569 cartographic definition of the world became one of the most influential and widely circulated world map projections throughout the 19th and 20th centuries”, the authors write.
The authors go on to point out that indeed the landmass of Africa is, “the size of India, China, the United States and most of Europe combined”, and that, “Africa’s blue or maritime economy is even bigger than its landmass”. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is about half the size of the European Union.
When it comes to the continent of Africa, we have so many misperceptions, however, to undo. ‘Misperceptions’ is perhaps misleading, for indeed the distortion of African realities has a long spectrum that includes, for example, the racist language of David Hume in his essay, “Of National Characters” in 1748, to the annual reports of certain extraction companies in contemporary times, and of course if we are to undo misperceptions, we must re-conceptualise, redo development theory and practice, international trade, architectures of debt and dependency. It is significant, too, that anthropology is missing as a tool in the contemporary accounts. That great intellectual and moral impulse to understand culture seems to have been consigned to 19th century history shelves with the decline of Empire, a project it served so well. Yet of course, it could yield, in contemporary times, valuable insights if utilised as alternative to some World Bank reviews.
Today Africa is the continent of the young, accounting for 20 percent of the young people of the world, a continent of over 1.3 billion people in 2018. It constitutes 16 percent of the world’s human population. It is, therefore, a continent on which the hopes of so much of our shared future rests. It is on this continent we might perhaps see the playing out to fruition of our efforts at achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, provide an adequate anticipation and response to climate change – in short, achieving that connection between economy, society, ecology and culture that we so urgently need and cannot postpone, involving, as it does, the future of the planet itself as a habitable space.
For Africans there is the urgent need for reducing poverty, for good security in the basic necessities of life, of delivering healthy living conditions, for universal basic services including education and healthcare, for peace and reconciliation and an end to conflict, and for an enduring, sustainable future built on prosperity in its widest, most fulfilling, inclusive sense.
For the achievement of a fruitful dialogue between the European Union and Africa, there are preliminary tasks to be accomplished at European level, one of the most important being abandoning any affected amnesia as to the brutal colonisation of previous times, acknowledging the detritus of imperial subjugations which surfaces too often, stirred by fingers of hands that are carrying the old intent.
For while Europeans choose to forget, Africans rightly remember. We in the European Union, must transact that painful memory if we are, as Hannah Arendt might put it, to stop the events of the past crippling us in the present and obstructing us in the future. I worry that we have not reached the point of critical sophistication that will do that. I recall the dismissive response I received to a quotation I made in one of my papers from one of Sankar Muthu’s books. I think it was Enlightenment against Empire. We do really need to be free and courageous in critiquing empire in the same way as we have been willing to set about critiquing the extremes and possible abuses of nationalism past and present.
Ireland and Africa
Ireland’s relationship with Africa is quite a unique one, be it from the work of Roger Casement, to contemporary non-governmental organisations and Irish Aid. It has, unlike the historical relationship of former empires, been largely one of identifying with the aspirations of Africans for lives of freedom from hunger, access to education, and achievement of inclusive rights, including the full rights of women to participation in all aspects of life. These are powerful foundations upon which to press upon the European Union the need to develop a future relationship with the continent of Africa, which will be one of African agency in a transformed Africa.
Ireland brings to the African table its own experience, not only of an economic, social, political domination, but also the experience of a suppressed culture, forced exile and, frankly, of racism, as Hume put it in the specific case of the Irish, they having missed out on the civilisation that he thought a Roman occupation might have brought them, thus were uncivilised, but, above all else, ‘lesser’.
Ireland welcomes the centrality of African agency in the new work on the transformation of Africa, and sees it as being an immensely valuable contribution, having a global significance as we re-define economics and its connection to ecology and culture.
Ireland has, from missionaries to aid and development workers, a special connection among African nations resulting from its contribution to education, and we can, as a result, be looked to as a source of leadership in other areas, such as addressing those unfair and imbalanced terms of trade that currently prevail which confine African produce to the lower end of the value chain, for example, confine Africa’s benefit from its coffee trade to a paltry 10 percent, and the appalling trade conditions imposed on coffee products produced in Africa that limit any gains in the value of finished products.
Not only as President of Ireland, but through a lifetime in Parliament, I have often stressed that Ireland needs to continue to deepen its diplomacy with the continent that will, after all, be the birthplace of over 2 billion people by 2050, a continent of such population that, quite scandalously, continues to be under-represented on the Security Council of the United Nations, allowed to present its own version of African needs and possibilities. Ireland’s deepening of diplomatic representation in Africa is currently underway, I am so glad to hear that.
It is not only in addressing the under-representation of the people of Africa that Ireland can give a lead. At the United Nations Ireland can show leadership in calling for an urgent review and redesign of the architecture of the global financial institutions, an architecture that for so long now passed purpose, an architecture that has not succeeded in preventing our planet, in ecological terms, being brought to the brink of survival itself, that has failed to eliminate global poverty, that has deepened inequality, that has lost cohesion between and within North and South, and has left a world where conflict is endemic, and never short of armaments produced in countries including those who speak of a peaceful world.
Given all of this and what Africa now faces, in conditions of pandemic, offers such as a suspension of six months’ interest on debt, as proposed by the G7, should be seen for what it is – a grossly inadequate gesture offered from a distance by those not sufficiently engaged with the human dimension of their proposals in a financialised global economy that eschews any notion of a moral compass.
Last month, Ireland become the 27th non-regional member of the African Development Bank. This is as an important addition to the deepening ties that will inform Ireland’s relationship to Africa and its people. The African Development Bank, and the African Development Fund it administers, can play an important role in fostering sustainable and inclusive social and economic growth and prosperity, helping the African continent to achieve its potential in a sustainable way as the continent of promise and opportunity. For Africa it is just that, a continent where transformation is already underway. In that we can be partners.
The African Development Bank is currently implementing a 10-year strategy to 2022, focused on two objectives: inclusive growth and green growth for Africa, aiming for a prosperity that is more equally shared and meets the needs of present generations without compromising the wellbeing of future generations. This also involves the taking into consideration of the differing social, economic, and environmental aspects that arise in the sustainable development of countries that have differences that must be recognised.
To achieve these objectives, the Bank has set five operational priorities, including infrastructure development, regional economic integration, private sector development, governance and accountability strengthening, and upscaling skills and technology training, together with three areas of special emphasis, namely fragile states, gender, and agriculture and food security. A disbursement of $6.6 billion occurred in 2018 to successful projects in these priority areas.
There have been many great achievements already resulting from such funding. For example, 100 percent of new lending from the African Development Bank on energy projects in 2017 was on renewables, up from 14 percent in 2015. Just last week, a new solar farm on the outskirts of Mogadishu should, according to its owners, quadruple power generation for the Somalian capital, whilst also cutting costs. It has provided 8 megawatts of clean electricity since March, and is predicted to provide 100 megawatts by 2022.
Technology has also given other benefits, contributing significantly to the enabling of democratic processes. In line with the freedoms that characterise democracy, today more Africans can access the internet, use mobile phones, and share information with the world at large. The total Sub-Saharan African population with internet access has almost tripled, from 7 percent in 2010 to nearly 22 percent in 2017. Likewise, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled to 764 million in the same period, according to Daniel F. Runde’s analysis, The Role of the AfDB and the Future of Africa, published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in October last year.
Our membership of the African Development Bank and its trust fund is an investment in Africa’s potential, and Ireland’s partnership with these important regional multilateral institutions will both advance our shared, but redefined, development priorities. Membership and investment will open future opportunities for Irish science and technology in the region, as well as support projects that spur food security, sufficiency, poverty reduction and sustainable economic development at different levels across Africa.
Africa, ‘the smart continent’ of the future, with a civilisation of sufficiency and inclusion, can be an exemplar, and I believe a leader, in the better and inclusive use of technology.
COVID-19 and Africa
As our world, in all its different circumstances, continues to respond to the threat to individuals, families, communities, societies and economies, it is difficult to overstate the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken – the lives cut short, the space and time for the expression of grief curtailed for those who have lost loved ones, lack of access, denial of liberty, those experiencing severe illness or who are vulnerable, livelihoods made insecure or lost for millions of families.
Coronavirus, being a global problem, necessitates a global response. Yet, it is so plainly evident that societies differ in their capacity to respond, such as those in Africa who are in a profoundly exposed position in terms of resources – for example, the proportion of the population that is reliant on the informal economy that prevails, and the consequent limitation that results on the measures that may be utilised in responding to COVID-19. While the pandemic is a global threat, our global vulnerability differs greatly. These differences test both our global solidarity and the architecture of our multilateralism now so much under threat.
COVID-19 is a reality in all countries of Africa. We should therefore remind ourselves that there is now an unprecedented opportunity for Europe to begin its journey towards a new contemporary and future shared ethical relationship, and do so not only as good regionalism, but also as an exercise in multilateralism, forging a new approach in its relationship with Africa, this time based on solidarity, one that will include a fundamental re-examination of how unfair trade and existing debt structures are impeding, not only the capacity to respond to COVID-19, but also the necessary transformations which a continent is getting underway, with an African agency that seeks a new form of partnership with its most proximate neighbour, the European Union.
May I suggest that now is not a time for retreating behind borders. In the African countries where COVID-19 has arrived in greatest numbers, there are immense problems and inequalities in terms of healthcare provision. The same is true of Latin and Central America.
Given such inadequacies of equipment and personnel, where it is most needed, there is a real risk that the pandemic could be difficult to contain across Africa and Latin America, and could result in mass fatalities and wider socio-economic problems, particularly in the possible event of a second wave of the virus. The prospect of a future vaccine does not come guaranteed, despite multilateral requests, as to its widespread availability in impoverished nations. There is a need for a global response as to the freedom and capacity of access of all to a vaccine that will have been probably developed with shared global research, State and private.
United Nations Secretary General Guterres has correctly underscored how, if COVID-19 is to be countered, richer countries must assist those less resourced, or potentially as he put it “face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the Global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed”.
The unresolved issues of hunger are now, in 2020, all exacerbated. According to recent research published by Oxfam, Coronavirus could double chronic hunger in Africa. Both the virus and the restrictions imposed to curb its spread are disrupting planting, harvesting, the movement of farm labour, and the scale and distribution of produce across Africa. There are urgent calls for borders to remain open for essential agri-food trade.
In this context, it is necessary to recognise how dangerously fragile, often shallow, at times contradictory, the practice of multilateralism has become, how some conflicts are being continued even as the United Nations recently called for a ceasefire to enable citizens and their governments to respond to the challenges posed by the Coronavirus.
In addition to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many African countries, particularly those in the east of the continent, are now in the throes of a second wave of desert locusts, many times worse than the plague that descended a number of months ago. The locusts present “an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods, according to the United Nations. A swarm of just half a square kilometre can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people.
.
Áras an Uachtaráin, 10 June 2020
A chairde,
I am delighted to be with you all today, even if it is to be in a virtual sense, to address the important topic of how we might pursue the most fruitful relations between Africa and the EU, how Europe might release itself from the narrative of the past and be part of a narrative of hope, be engaging as equals with our planet’s neighbouring continent of the young.
This is a topic on which I, as President of Ireland, have spoken on several occasions, a topic about which I feel passionately, for the quality of the European Union’s relationship with the continent of Africa and its people is a subject of such great importance, a topic which carries hope in its transformative potential for so many, yes for Africa, but also all of us as we seek to address the issues of our time, including the dysfunctional balance of economy, society, culture and, most importantly, ecology and the loss of biodiversity.
May I first thank the Institute for International and European Affairs for the invitation to address you, and compliment the Institute which has, in recent years, become such a critical resource for sharing ideas and evidence that are helping to influence policy at European and global levels.
Misconceptions of Africa
We have now the gift of new empirically based research published on Africa. For Europeans the issue is do we read it, respond to it, allow it to influence policy and our EU-Africa relationships and Agreements.
For example, the subtitle Carlos Lopes and George Kararach gave to their recent (2020) valuable work, Sustainable Change in Africa, is “Misperceptions, New Narratives and Development in the 21st Century”. I was struck by something most basic when I first read the book. It was how the Mercator projection has suggested to generations of Europeans that the continent of Africa is about the same size as Greenland. Greenland is in fact 14 times smaller. “Mercator’s 1569 cartographic definition of the world became one of the most influential and widely circulated world map projections throughout the 19th and 20th centuries”, the authors write.
The authors go on to point out that indeed the landmass of Africa is, “the size of India, China, the United States and most of Europe combined”, and that, “Africa’s blue or maritime economy is even bigger than its landmass”. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is about half the size of the European Union.
When it comes to the continent of Africa, we have so many misperceptions, however, to undo. ‘Misperceptions’ is perhaps misleading, for indeed the distortion of African realities has a long spectrum that includes, for example, the racist language of David Hume in his essay, “Of National Characters” in 1748, to the annual reports of certain extraction companies in contemporary times, and of course if we are to undo misperceptions, we must re-conceptualise, redo development theory and practice, international trade, architectures of debt and dependency. It is significant, too, that anthropology is missing as a tool in the contemporary accounts. That great intellectual and moral impulse to understand culture seems to have been consigned to 19th century history shelves with the decline of Empire, a project it served so well. Yet of course, it could yield, in contemporary times, valuable insights if utilised as alternative to some World Bank reviews.
Today Africa is the continent of the young, accounting for 20 percent of the young people of the world, a continent of over 1.3 billion people in 2018. It constitutes 16 percent of the world’s human population. It is, therefore, a continent on which the hopes of so much of our shared future rests. It is on this continent we might perhaps see the playing out to fruition of our efforts at achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, provide an adequate anticipation and response to climate change – in short, achieving that connection between economy, society, ecology and culture that we so urgently need and cannot postpone, involving, as it does, the future of the planet itself as a habitable space.
For Africans there is the urgent need for reducing poverty, for good security in the basic necessities of life, of delivering healthy living conditions, for universal basic services including education and healthcare, for peace and reconciliation and an end to conflict, and for an enduring, sustainable future built on prosperity in its widest, most fulfilling, inclusive sense.
For the achievement of a fruitful dialogue between the European Union and Africa, there are preliminary tasks to be accomplished at European level, one of the most important being abandoning any affected amnesia as to the brutal colonisation of previous times, acknowledging the detritus of imperial subjugations which surfaces too often, stirred by fingers of hands that are carrying the old intent.
For while Europeans choose to forget, Africans rightly remember. We in the European Union, must transact that painful memory if we are, as Hannah Arendt might put it, to stop the events of the past crippling us in the present and obstructing us in the future. I worry that we have not reached the point of critical sophistication that will do that. I recall the dismissive response I received to a quotation I made in one of my papers from one of Sankar Muthu’s books. I think it was Enlightenment against Empire. We do really need to be free and courageous in critiquing empire in the same way as we have been willing to set about critiquing the extremes and possible abuses of nationalism past and present.
Ireland and Africa
Ireland’s relationship with Africa is quite a unique one, be it from the work of Roger Casement, to contemporary non-governmental organisations and Irish Aid. It has, unlike the historical relationship of former empires, been largely one of identifying with the aspirations of Africans for lives of freedom from hunger, access to education, and achievement of inclusive rights, including the full rights of women to participation in all aspects of life. These are powerful foundations upon which to press upon the European Union the need to develop a future relationship with the continent of Africa, which will be one of African agency in a transformed Africa.
Ireland brings to the African table its own experience, not only of an economic, social, political domination, but also the experience of a suppressed culture, forced exile and, frankly, of racism, as Hume put it in the specific case of the Irish, they having missed out on the civilisation that he thought a Roman occupation might have brought them, thus were uncivilised, but, above all else, ‘lesser’.
Ireland welcomes the centrality of African agency in the new work on the transformation of Africa, and sees it as being an immensely valuable contribution, having a global significance as we re-define economics and its connection to ecology and culture.
Ireland has, from missionaries to aid and development workers, a special connection among African nations resulting from its contribution to education, and we can, as a result, be looked to as a source of leadership in other areas, such as addressing those unfair and imbalanced terms of trade that currently prevail which confine African produce to the lower end of the value chain, for example, confine Africa’s benefit from its coffee trade to a paltry 10 percent, and the appalling trade conditions imposed on coffee products produced in Africa that limit any gains in the value of finished products.
Not only as President of Ireland, but through a lifetime in Parliament, I have often stressed that Ireland needs to continue to deepen its diplomacy with the continent that will, after all, be the birthplace of over 2 billion people by 2050, a continent of such population that, quite scandalously, continues to be under-represented on the Security Council of the United Nations, allowed to present its own version of African needs and possibilities. Ireland’s deepening of diplomatic representation in Africa is currently underway, I am so glad to hear that.
It is not only in addressing the under-representation of the people of Africa that Ireland can give a lead. At the United Nations Ireland can show leadership in calling for an urgent review and redesign of the architecture of the global financial institutions, an architecture that for so long now passed purpose, an architecture that has not succeeded in preventing our planet, in ecological terms, being brought to the brink of survival itself, that has failed to eliminate global poverty, that has deepened inequality, that has lost cohesion between and within North and South, and has left a world where conflict is endemic, and never short of armaments produced in countries including those who speak of a peaceful world.
Given all of this and what Africa now faces, in conditions of pandemic, offers such as a suspension of six months’ interest on debt, as proposed by the G7, should be seen for what it is – a grossly inadequate gesture offered from a distance by those not sufficiently engaged with the human dimension of their proposals in a financialised global economy that eschews any notion of a moral compass.
Last month, Ireland become the 27th non-regional member of the African Development Bank. This is as an important addition to the deepening ties that will inform Ireland’s relationship to Africa and its people. The African Development Bank, and the African Development Fund it administers, can play an important role in fostering sustainable and inclusive social and economic growth and prosperity, helping the African continent to achieve its potential in a sustainable way as the continent of promise and opportunity. For Africa it is just that, a continent where transformation is already underway. In that we can be partners.
The African Development Bank is currently implementing a 10-year strategy to 2022, focused on two objectives: inclusive growth and green growth for Africa, aiming for a prosperity that is more equally shared and meets the needs of present generations without compromising the wellbeing of future generations. This also involves the taking into consideration of the differing social, economic, and environmental aspects that arise in the sustainable development of countries that have differences that must be recognised.
To achieve these objectives, the Bank has set five operational priorities, including infrastructure development, regional economic integration, private sector development, governance and accountability strengthening, and upscaling skills and technology training, together with three areas of special emphasis, namely fragile states, gender, and agriculture and food security. A disbursement of $6.6 billion occurred in 2018 to successful projects in these priority areas.
There have been many great achievements already resulting from such funding. For example, 100 percent of new lending from the African Development Bank on energy projects in 2017 was on renewables, up from 14 percent in 2015. Just last week, a new solar farm on the outskirts of Mogadishu should, according to its owners, quadruple power generation for the Somalian capital, whilst also cutting costs. It has provided 8 megawatts of clean electricity since March, and is predicted to provide 100 megawatts by 2022.
Technology has also given other benefits, contributing significantly to the enabling of democratic processes. In line with the freedoms that characterise democracy, today more Africans can access the internet, use mobile phones, and share information with the world at large. The total Sub-Saharan African population with internet access has almost tripled, from 7 percent in 2010 to nearly 22 percent in 2017. Likewise, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled to 764 million in the same period, according to Daniel F. Runde’s analysis, The Role of the AfDB and the Future of Africa, published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in October last year.
Our membership of the African Development Bank and its trust fund is an investment in Africa’s potential, and Ireland’s partnership with these important regional multilateral institutions will both advance our shared, but redefined, development priorities. Membership and investment will open future opportunities for Irish science and technology in the region, as well as support projects that spur food security, sufficiency, poverty reduction and sustainable economic development at different levels across Africa.
Africa, ‘the smart continent’ of the future, with a civilisation of sufficiency and inclusion, can be an exemplar, and I believe a leader, in the better and inclusive use of technology.
COVID-19 and Africa
As our world, in all its different circumstances, continues to respond to the threat to individuals, families, communities, societies and economies, it is difficult to overstate the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken – the lives cut short, the space and time for the expression of grief curtailed for those who have lost loved ones, lack of access, denial of liberty, those experiencing severe illness or who are vulnerable, livelihoods made insecure or lost for millions of families.
Coronavirus, being a global problem, necessitates a global response. Yet, it is so plainly evident that societies differ in their capacity to respond, such as those in Africa who are in a profoundly exposed position in terms of resources – for example, the proportion of the population that is reliant on the informal economy that prevails, and the consequent limitation that results on the measures that may be utilised in responding to COVID-19. While the pandemic is a global threat, our global vulnerability differs greatly. These differences test both our global solidarity and the architecture of our multilateralism now so much under threat.
COVID-19 is a reality in all countries of Africa. We should therefore remind ourselves that there is now an unprecedented opportunity for Europe to begin its journey towards a new contemporary and future shared ethical relationship, and do so not only as good regionalism, but also as an exercise in multilateralism, forging a new approach in its relationship with Africa, this time based on solidarity, one that will include a fundamental re-examination of how unfair trade and existing debt structures are impeding, not only the capacity to respond to COVID-19, but also the necessary transformations which a continent is getting underway, with an African agency that seeks a new form of partnership with its most proximate neighbour, the European Union.
May I suggest that now is not a time for retreating behind borders. In the African countries where COVID-19 has arrived in greatest numbers, there are immense problems and inequalities in terms of healthcare provision. The same is true of Latin and Central America.
Given such inadequacies of equipment and personnel, where it is most needed, there is a real risk that the pandemic could be difficult to contain across Africa and Latin America, and could result in mass fatalities and wider socio-economic problems, particularly in the possible event of a second wave of the virus. The prospect of a future vaccine does not come guaranteed, despite multilateral requests, as to its widespread availability in impoverished nations. There is a need for a global response as to the freedom and capacity of access of all to a vaccine that will have been probably developed with shared global research, State and private.
United Nations Secretary General Guterres has correctly underscored how, if COVID-19 is to be countered, richer countries must assist those less resourced, or potentially as he put it “face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the Global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed”.
The unresolved issues of hunger are now, in 2020, all exacerbated. According to recent research published by Oxfam, Coronavirus could double chronic hunger in Africa. Both the virus and the restrictions imposed to curb its spread are disrupting planting, harvesting, the movement of farm labour, and the scale and distribution of produce across Africa. There are urgent calls for borders to remain open for essential agri-food trade.
In this context, it is necessary to recognise how dangerously fragile, often shallow, at times contradictory, the practice of multilateralism has become, how some conflicts are being continued even as the United Nations recently called for a ceasefire to enable citizens and their governments to respond to the challenges posed by the Coronavirus.
In addition to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many African countries, particularly those in the east of the continent, are now in the throes of a second wave of desert locusts, many times worse than the plague that descended a number of months ago. The locusts present “an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods, according to the United Nations. A swarm of just half a square kilometre can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people.
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