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What Happens to Bill Gates' Dairy Cows?: Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

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.

Got that?

Because of children's natural love of animals, Heifer International is a popular charity project in elementary schools--though it stresses it cannot reveal the fate of individual animals it sends overseas so don't ask.

But teachers who go on Heifer sponsored junkets to recipient nations can come back with disturbing stories.

Like Donna Sosnowski, a fourth-grade teacher at Virginia Palmer Elementary School in Sun Valley, NV who discovered children were sleeping with their Heifer animals to keep them from being stolen on a tour of Honduras this summer, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

And Amy Carrington, a teacher in White County, Arkansas who also toured Honduras where "villagers shared their hardships with her, such as when a disease killed off all the chickens in a particular village," reported the Daily Citizen in Searcy, AK.

Then there's Heifer International's Global Village program in Perryville, AK where school kids who vote that they want meat for dinner will witness the teacher break a rabbit's neck, chop off its head, skin it and cook it.

Last year one unidentified mother emailed Arkansas' Fox 16 TV station to say her son still talks about hearing the rabbit scream as its neck was broken when he attended a Global Village as a 5th grader.

Heifer also has the nation's top columnist, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, in its thrall.

"The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice was born and raised," begins a PR wire style piece this month about Heifer poster child and star of the children's book Beatrice's Goat, Beatrice Biira. "As a girl, she desperately yearned (sic.) for an education, but it seemed hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldn't afford to send her to school."

PR story short, Beatrice grew up, went to college and plans to work against African poverty all because some children at the Niantic Community Church in Niantic, CN "decided to buy goats for African villagers through Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps impoverished farming families," writes Kristof in the irony-free column titled The Luckiest Girl.

"A dairy goat in Heifer's online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of chicks or ducklings costs just $20," he adds, in case you want to donate too.

Since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its grant, Heifer has received an unprecedented $126.5 million in matching donations which funds a lot of Noah's Arks--or death ships as animal advocates might say.

Despite gender dressing--Heifer claims most dairy operations are run by women--experts say animal based agriculture misuses land and resources, promotes high fat Western diets and jeopardizes human and animal health by inviting zoonotic diseases like Avian flu.

Programs like Heifer also betray a "Caucasian bias" by ignoring lactose intolerance Dr. Hetal Karsan, a gastroenterologist at Atlanta's Emory University, told the Associated Press. Maybe pharma will send Lactaid supplements.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable. She can be reached at mrosenberg@evmark.org

 

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mkeating
post Yesterday, 05:52 PM



Ms. Rosenberg's column raises valid issues about Western-oriented development in Africa, but her biases and factual inaccuracies undercut her effectiveness. To begin with: Please identify an indigenous African culture that does NOT include animal protein as a fundamental component of its diet. The reality is that indigenous people, not only in Africa but across the globe, have always prized high quality animal protein in their diets, especially the diets of infants and pregnant women. I recommend the teachings of the Weston A. Price Foundation for a thorough appraisal of this subject. The meat, organs, milk, bone and blood of both wild and domesticated animals is a constant presence in the diets of African people. I believe that your lactose intolerance statements are exaggerated; not many people are actually intolerant of either raw or fermented milk from culturally appropriate animals, including goats and sheep.
Secondly, Heifer does not ship animals around the world; they buy their gift animals in-country. This makes sense for obvious economic and epidemiological reasons, which Ms. Rosenberg rightfully raises. She also raises excellent points about the feasibility of technologically intensive development initiatives such as the one she cites started by the Gates Foundation. These concerns do not obviate the facts that food from animals has been central to communal structure in Africa for millenia and that Heifer has long promoted and practiced low-input, culturally appropriate development strategies.
Ms. Rosenberg quickly dismisses Nicholas Kristof's story about a family benefitting from a Heifer gift animal, though she presents absolutely no basis for doing so. Apparently it doesn't "ring true" to her, so she declares that it can't be true. Doesn't having children sleep next to their gift animals to prevent their theft reflect how important those animals are to the family? And if a child was disturbed by the slaughter of an animal for food, that is an issue that each of us has to confront, whether one chooses to eat animal products or not. Welcome to life.
It is perfectly appropriate for an adult to choose not to consume animal products. The decision to forgo animal derived foods served me well for many years, and reverting to a diet rich in animal protein from naturally raised animals has proven beneficial, too. I know that there are dedicated vegans who meet their personal health and nutritional requirements for extended periods, but that is not representative of broad human experience. A friend once described vegetarianism as an effective therapy, which I believe is an accurate description. With all therapies, there is hope that treatment needn't last a lifetime, and there are very, very good reasons to maintain a diet that incorporates large quantities of high quality animal products. That is precisely what indigenous cultures have done for millenia, and we know that these cultures have a social harmony and ecological vision that eclipses Western "civilization". Modern agribusiness spent the twentieth century filling our diets with refined carbohydrates and the result has been an explosion of heart disease (previously rare) and obesity.
From my personal experience - and I've been involved in development work in poor communities abroad - Heifer International is a wonderful organization that has done a great deal of good and has very responsibly handled its resources. There is a very powerful ethic of both self-reliance and social responsibility in their work. I respect Ms. Rosenberg for the concerns she raises, but she presents a very superficial analysis of Heifer - minimal research is required to learn that that they buy animals in country, for example - that is a thinly disguised vehicle to convey her displeasure with animal agriculture.

SueMag
post Today, 10:36 PM


shame on martha