If you live in the minority world (that’s the rich bits) in 2020 and you were asked what event had the greatest impact on your world during the year, I imagine the answer would be fairly straightforward: coronavirus. If you lived in huge sections of the majority world, that might not be the case. I imagine you would get a variety of answers but one of them would be locusts. And when it comes to the headcount the locusts are still in the game. Because although COVID has killed its hundreds of thousands, the locusts could still get millions. That’s not hyperbole, 25 million people in Kenya and East Africa alone are at risk from acute food shortages because these famine inducing swarms are still eating everything in sight. Back in the rich bits there are no shortages, not even of toilet paper any longer due to coronavirus.

I’ve posted stories about these beasties dating back to January and here we are in August and we still the locusts are swarming. A brief recap, this year billions and possibly trillions of locusts have swarmed in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, India and also South America. So while not as global as the virus the locusts have mounted a worldwide campaign and are chomping on multiple fronts. And yes, the media are finally calling them ‘biblical’.

Beyond raising awareness of the plight of your fellow men and women, this is probably as good as an example as any of how the media shapes your view of the world and what you think is important or really serious. I’m guessing it’s very unlikely that you will have thought much about locusts and there’s as little you can do as you can to ‘fight the war’ on COVID-19. But if we weighted the world fairly and looked back and judged the impact and truly believed that Kenyan lives matter as much as British or Swedish ones, then we might just conclude that the worst thing to happen this year did not happen to us.