How Climate Change Narrative Is Preventing Africa From Modernizing and Gaining Prosperity

From The Epoch Times

“A combine harvester could replace 1,000 people,” Jusper Machogu, an agricultural engineer and farmer in Kenya, told The Epoch Times. “It makes me sad whenever I see my mom wading through millet. We have women kneeling down and uprooting weeds throughout the farm all day, and it’s sunny. Those machines would change our lives.”

“I come from a community where people use cow dung to fertilize their farms,” Mr. Machogu said. “And the reason for that is because last year, the government of Kenya decided that they were going to listen to what the IMF was telling them. It was telling them to end fertilizer subsidies. You can imagine how that’s going to impact farmers. The fertilizer prices went up by almost two times. We have very poor people around here. So, if I was [purchasing] 20 kilos for my farm, I’m forced to get 10 kilos now. Most people have gone back to using cow dung, which is not a good nitrogenous fertilizer for their crop. You can’t compare urea, with a 46 percent nitrogenous content, to cow dung, with only 4 percent. It doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Machogu said the IMF and the Western nations that embrace climate policies for Africa are engaging in neocolonialism, or “climate colonialism. The new climate colonialism is being driven by global entities such as the U.N., which says Africa should have energy but that because of climate concerns, it should focus on wind and solar.

Calvin Beisner, founder and president of the Christian-brd Cornwall Alliance, said that currently, “the most harmful policy” is that the IMF, World Bank, and agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development “refuse to do loans or other funding for coal, natural gas, or oil-brd electric generating stations in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America.”

Vijay Jayaraj, a research associate for the CO2 Coalition, said he grew up in India and witnessed the growth of India’s industrialization—courtesy of fossil fuels. “In terms of economic development, energy is the foundational keystone,” Mr. Jayaraj told The Epoch Times. “If you’re going to disrupt how people get energy—where and what quality of energy they receive—it will have an impact. Not just generally, in terms of the economy and the GDP, but also the household and individual level.”

The U.N. Environment Programme’s current official position regarding Africa is to help it achieve modernization but to do so under strict environmental guidelines. Notably, that includes increasing access to and reliance on wind and solar energy . . .

Mr. Machogu said that in layman’s terms, the U.N.’s policy boils down to “no fossil fuels for Africa,” which necessarily means no economic progress. Conversely, unrestricted access to fossil fuels could help pull Africa out of poverty.

“Let me speak for Africa because 60 percent of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood,” Mr. Machogu said. “We need fossil fuels for farm machinery. Despite the fact that the U.N., the IMF, the World Bank, and all of these environmental organizations say solar and wind for Africa, we can’t electrify agriculture—if we did electrify, it would be a tiny percent.”

In addition to needing fossil fuels for machines and access to loans to purchase them, Mr. Machogu said expanded irrigation, courtesy of fossil fuels, would benefit Africa. “Africa is not all green,” he said. “We have other places that are very dry. So, one of the easiest ways we can end that is by irrigating our land, and we will irrigate our lands using pipes from fossil fuels.” Holding up a yellow plastic bucket and panning to his surrounding crops, Mr. Machogu said most Africans get water for crops by lugging it from wells. The farther your crop is from the well, the more backbreaking and time-consuming the labor.

Finally, Mr. Machogu explained that use of urea, a fertilizer made from ammonia and liquid carbon dioxide, is significantly lower in Africa, thanks, in part, to external pressure from entities such as the IMF.

Mr. Beisner concurred. “The fuel cost problem is real and rising in sub-Saharan Africa, frankly, around the world,” he said. “As our policies drive that increase in the cost of fuel, we are essentially condemning people to have less food harvested and, therefore, less food available to put on the table at higher prices.”

Mr. Beisner said the pivot away from natural gas as a fuel also affects nitrogenous fertilizers, which need “vast amounts” of it to be produced.

Banning natural gas as a fuel would have a ripple effect, he said. Fertilizer prices would increase, fertilizer use would decrease, and then food production around the world would decline.

Mr. Machogu said that unlike in Western civilizations, if profit from agriculture decreases, African farmers can’t simply look for another line of work. “In Kenya, almost 80 percent of our population is earning a living from agriculture,” he said. “So, there is no way we’re going to stop farming. What’s going to happen, and what has happened, is that most people are now getting less production from their farms, which means that you don’t have supplies to sell for you to buy, let’s say, cloth for your kids, or to pay school fees for your kids. And for other people, they cannot even feed themselves [from their farm]. They have to buy food.”

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