Finally ended up just doing a dump of the countries in to a json file and writing a migration to update the database.
def forwards(apps, schema_editor):
Country = apps.get_model('country', 'Country')
Region = apps.get_model('country', 'Region')
Region.objects.filter(id=45).delete()
with codecs.open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'countries.json'), encoding='utf-8') as cfile:
data = json.load(cfile)
for country, regions in data.items():
country, created = Country.objects.get_or_create(name=country)
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('country', 'previous_migration'),
]
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(forwards),
]