Can sending a cow feed a country?

from the Times

Well meaning acts of charity can have consequences that may harm it's recipients. Many have argued that sending livestock to Africa, can stretch the thin resourses even thinner. As the new owners would use grain to feed thecow that couldfeed themselves. A scientist in the UK recently went on record to say that this "keeps Africa poor"In this piece for the Times Paul Heiney traveled to Africato see if it could work.

For this important rendezvous, we drove 35 miles southeast from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, on the same dusty, rutted road I had journeyed down years ago. From the town of Mityana, where crowds of penniless youths lazily lined the streets waiting for something, anything, positive to happen in their lives, we travelled to a huddle of mud huts in a place called Ngungulo. Wood smoke from outdoor kitchens filled the dusty air while the leaves of banana trees clattered above us; we stopped at a small house set amid vanilla and coffee trees. And there she was: the black and white cow I had come to see. She was bright of eye, glossy of coat, and smelling of milk, as a healthy cow should be. I bent down to look her in the eye and under the blaze of the equatorial sun I whispered, “Tutti's granddaughter, I presume?''

Do you remember Tutti the black and white cow? I shall never forget her. She came into my life, and perhaps yours, back in the mid-Nineties, when I was writing in this paper about my quixotic Suffolk farm with its truculent livestock and often exasperated owner. A charity called Send a Cow came to my attention. They'd had the original (or possibly foolhardy) idea of sending pregnant cows, of which Britain had too many, to the poorest people in a bankrupt and demoralised Uganda who were in desperate need of them. It was more than just milk machines they thought they were exporting: they believed they were spreading wealth and hope.

It worked like this. Ownership of a milking cow, for a poor Ugandan farmer for whom a wheelbarrow was beyond dreams, brought immediate benefits. The family added to their poor diet by drinking the milk, obviously, but surplus milk could be sold and income created. Feed for the cow had to be grown, which might need extra labour, but that too could be paid for out of the milk money. The animal had suddenly turned into a real cash cow. Add to that the increased soil fertility after liberal doses of cow manure, resulting in better crops, and you start to understand why this charity thought it could make a real and lasting difference to the poorest in Africa.

I was convinced, others were not. “Your cow will be eaten alive by savages,” cautioned one letter. “How could you condemn a cow to such an intolerable life? It will fry under the sun,” another said. But I knew that the Ugandan farmers were given lengthy training and the climate in the high plateau was akin to Devon on a summer's day, which suited the cows down to the ground. The Ugandans were herdsmen anyway before their troubles under Idi Amin. They would understand cows.

Each cow came with a promise: the first-born calf would be given free, as a gift, to another needy family. Like magic, the investment would double, and go on increasing, calf after calf. I wrote all this in this paper, the enthusiasm spread, and in response we raised the money to send our own cow to Africa. She was called Tutti and she flew to Uganda in June 1994. From Gatwick, actually. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of Send a Cow, it was time to revisit to see if what worked so beautifully on paper did just as well in the harsh economic environment of rural Africa.

The cow that stood before me now, peacefully chewing her cud, was not, of course, Tutti. Cows don't live that long. But Kadugalu (which means “black”) was the very latest of her direct descendants, and, to my relieved eyes, encouraging evidence that this had been no half-baked adventure. Tutti's calf, called Jacob, had been a bull, and so was destined to lead a vigorous love life in which he served no fewer than 236 cows in three years. Good lad! Every one of those romances is recorded in a dusty exercise book in a precise hand and treasured by his proud keepers, the Luyombyas. He is fondly remembered.

“When the bull came,” Mrs Luyombyas says, “we were so proud that the whole family slept with him on the first night. And on the second night too.”

And what have Tutti's bull calf and the current cow done for them? For a start, the mud and wattle hut in which they had lived their entire lives and raised seven children has been replaced by a brick-built house. “Look, we've got proper windows which close,” she boasts, while Mr Luyombyas adds that by drinking the milk “we are much healthier. And we have been able to buy beds!” Now, above the clatter of the banana trees, you can also hear the rattle of a precious, elderly Singer sewing machine, a huge investment by their standards and bought with milk money. They use it to make school uniforms.

Ten other farmers from the local support group now joined in with enthusiastic talk of cows. But it is not until the mention of the word “manure” that their eyes really light up. “With the manure,” one of them explains, “I grow twice as many bananas. Big bananas.” They revere the dung as much as the cows. “I can even grow carrots,” he adds with great pride. The farmers now understand the secret that has long eluded them: where there's muck, there's money.

If you ask to meet a farmer who has been given a cow, you will always be introduced to a woman. “We only work with women's groups,” Send a Cow says. “A few men do turn up, but we find that if the profit from the milk goes to the woman, it will end up back with the family. With the men, we couldn't be quite so certain.”

Ask the farmers what they will spend the money on and the answer is always the same - education. “Learning is our children's freedom,” said Catherine Kibuuka, chair of the Mityana women farmers' group. One girl who holds a degree in education, tried to explain to me what her life would have been like if her family had never been given a cow, but got no farther than the first few words before she broke down, distraught at the thought. She is one of seven children. Her brother has just received a degree in civil engineering. The cow paid for that, too.

And after buying the best education that they can afford for their children, what next? “Then education for us, for the farmers. We want more training to become even better farmers,” and a cheer goes up from the gathered women, ever anxious to show their gratitude for the gift of cows. “Yes! Let us become even better farmers,” they chant. These are determined women. This is their freedom, too.

It is at this point in the story that your responsible reporter should break off to spell out the downside. But I can't find one. Others have tried. Those few in Uganda who accuse aid work of being a new form of Western imperialism made quick efforts to deliberately confuse BSE, mad cow disease, with Aids in the minds of a fearful rural population, and the import of live cows was banned. By good fortune, sufficient bulls and cows were already in place for breeding to continue unaffected and cows need no longer make the long journey from Britain. As to the accusation of imperialism, Send a Cow says, “We help the people of Uganda to get what they want, we don't dictate.” It's hardly subversive.

Environmentalists argue that the entire scheme is unsound because not only are bovines poor converters of food, but cows frequently break wind and emit damaging methane. But an independent carbon audit of this entire cow-giving process, gas and all, including the huge amount of fertility returned to the soil, has shown it to be so carbon-friendly that they're practically in love with it. This, fortunately, spares Send a Cow an embarrassing encounter with the redoubtable Mrs Kibuuka where it says: “Sorry, your six kids will not be going to school after all because your cow farts too much.”

Send a Cow's 20th-anniversary celebrations, held on a playing field in the town of Mukono, were joyous, and grateful women travelled over many days from distant parts, wearing costumes as vivid as a curtain-maker's pattern book. They sang, chanted, and gave unending thanks.

There was a prize for best farmer and farming group, and unless you had seen the joy on their faces for yourself you could not believe that a woman would clutch a prize of a black plastic water-tank as happily as if she had won a lottery. One woman threw herself to the ground in delirious delight at being awarded a bundle of five shovels. Slightly embarrassed, I was forced to my feet to take a bow, on your behalf, as the only British donor farmer present. They remember Tutti and are still grateful.

Slowly but surely, the milky trail of kindness that began 20 years ago is spreading across Central Africa. In Rwanda, it is a condition that a calf born to a Hutu must be given to a Tutsi - a small bit of sticking plaster on a terrible wound.

In the remote foothills of the Elgin Mountains, on the border with Kenya, I went to see Olive Namoso, 34, widowed with five children and living in a small mud hut with one bed where the two youngest curl up with her for the night while the rest sleep on the earth floor. She is benefiting from Send a Cow's new initiative to make the cow (or sometimes goat) the centre of sustainable organic growing - insurance against hunger.

With generous gifts of precious manure from local cow owners, Olive grows cabbages, onions and spinach in rich soil that was once dust, to add to her children's bland and unsustaining diet. She wears pride on her face - a new experience - and with it comes the ambition to be a cow owner herself. She is already struggling to build a cowshed, but has stopped because, with a budget counted in pennies, she cannot afford the £1 to buy the final few nails to hold down the roof. The community will try to help.

The story of Send a Cow is one of farming and feeding, but beyond that of hope and choice, and of building communities where before there were none. It is yielding results that could never have been predicted. A man confessed to me, “I am ashamed to say it, but we used to beat our wives. But since they have learnt to become farmers and done so well for our families, we respect them greatly. There is no trouble in my house now.”

It is cows that have achieved this, with the help of a handful of British farmers who have inspired thousands of African women. It is easy for theorists such as Sir David King to condemn them. But theory now with a promise of food later fills no hungry bellies. Those founding farmers knew instinctively that rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it will always bring swift results in any part of the world. the Times cow, Tutti, was a small part of it. She did us proud.

DAIRY TALES

Send a Cow was founded in 1987 after an appeal for aid by the Archbishop of Uganda. The first shipment of 26 pregnant cows landed at a battle-scarred Entebbe airport, where burning oil drums served as landing lights.

Send a Cow has to date sent 300 live cows to Africa but, since the ban on livestock imports, has relied on breeding programmes within the nine Central African countries in which it operates, also using artificial insemination. There is now no need for live animal exports.

Thirteen thousand households have benefited directly, another 100,000 indirectly. Their current focus is on small-scale, animal-centred, sustainable, organic food production using goats and chickens, as well as cows.

The population of Uganda has doubled to 30 million in the time they have been operating in a predominately rural country where 70 per cent of all farm produce is still carried on the heads of women.

Each family has an average of seven children, not including adopted orphans.

Life expectancy is 47 years. Funerals are so frequent that the Government is considering restrictions which would confine them to Saturday afternoons to prevent the loss of working hours.

The recipient of Tutti, Betty Kiwanuka, is now on her third cow. She has called it Kirabo: Gift of God.

Link to full article. May expire in future.