The Horn of Africa did face a severe food crisis from 2020–2023, with drought leaving tens of millions in need and causing an estimated 43,000 excess deaths in Somalia in 2022 alone. (en.wikipedia.org) However, available data on funding and food assistance show that the main emergency response in Ethiopia and Somalia was led by the US and other G7 donors working largely through WFP and UN appeals, not by China. For example, the US government reported more than $1.3 billion in assistance to Somalia since the start of FY 2022, with a surge in humanitarian aid “mobilized in large part by the United States” credited by famine review bodies with delaying famine in parts of Somalia at the end of 2022; G7 partners (Germany, UK, Italy, Japan, etc.) also provided substantial emergency food funding for East Africa and the Horn. (worldjpn.net) At the global level, a Reuters analysis of UN data found that from 2020–2024 three donors—the US, Germany, and the European Commission—supplied 58% of all humanitarian funding, while China, India and Russia together provided less than 1%, indicating China was not a primary humanitarian food donor anywhere, including the Horn. (reuters.com) During the 2022–2023 food crisis, China did provide some bilateral emergency food assistance (e.g., an Ethiopia–China agreement worth about 161 million birr, roughly US$3 million, for emergency food aid in early 2023), but this was small compared with the scale of US and European funding, and there is no evidence China became the main supplier of cereals or food aid to Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, or Djibouti. (plenglish.com) In fact, analyses of the 2022–2023 global food crisis note that China was accumulating exceptionally large grain stockpiles (over half of world wheat and major shares of rice and maize) rather than exporting them at scale, which contributed to higher world prices rather than resolving shortages abroad. (en.wikipedia.org)

On the military/strategic side, China’s first and only confirmed overseas base in the Horn of Africa is the PLA Support Base in Djibouti, which was negotiated around 2015–2016 and has been operational since 2017—well before the 2022 podcast. (en.wikipedia.org) Open-source surveys of foreign military facilities in Djibouti and regional security analyses through 2023–2025 continue to list that single Chinese base and do not report any new Chinese military bases or similarly permanent facilities in Eritrea, Somalia, or Ethiopia. (en.wikipedia.org) While China’s economic and diplomatic footprint in the Horn has grown, there is no documented case where Chinese food assistance during the 2022–2023 crisis directly translated into a new or expanded permanent military or strategic foothold in the region.

Because (1) China did not become the primary food supplier resolving the Horn of Africa’s acute shortages in the year following April 2022, and (2) it did not secure at least one new or clearly expanded permanent military/strategic base there as a result of such food aid, the prediction did not materialize.