It almost sounds like a joke. Set up dairy enterprises in rural African villages with no refrigeration, electricity, veterinary care or passable roads for a population that can’t drink milk because it’s 90% lactose intolerant.
But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t think it was a joke when it announced the gift of $42 million to Heifer International at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January–the biggest gift the Little Rock, AR-based Christian charity which sends live animals to poor countries has ever received.
Using cherubic, 4-H/Unicef style advertising– kids hugging the animal “gifts” they will also dispatch–Heifer pledges to stamp out world hunger in poor countries using the grain, water and grazing land they don’t have to raise animals.
To get around the lack of rural electricity for the proposed dairy operations in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Heifer will create “chilling plants” with their own backup power generators according to a press release where the milk will be stored for pickup by “refrigerated commercial dairy delivery trucks”– both of them.
Farmers will artificially inseminate cows, perhaps by candlelight, with “high-production dairy animal semen”–more backup generators required to keep it frozen?–and increase milk quality through providing “improved animal nutrition” to the cows with the food they don’t have.
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung by Martha Rosenberg.
