Livestock purchase programs, such as World Vision’s Purchase-a-Goat, which aim to benefit impoverished countries are not always what they appear to be. It may be comforting to donors to think they are gifting a cute little animal, and as a marketing tool, it is effective in soliciting donations. But therein lies the point: These programs are meant to appease the donors, not the recipients, and to raise funds.
But ultimately, these livestock programs only serve to increase poverty; they also raise animal welfare and environmental issues.
It may come as a surprise to donors that the money raised goes not to buying specific goats, but toward infrastructure such as rent, staff and travel. For example, Oxfam says the money “will go toward funding programs that your item represents.” Research indicates that these programs are generally poorly documented and that few organizations actually deliver the animals promised. And those that do cause more harm than good.
As early as the ’70s, Frances Moore Lappe, in Diet for a Small Planet, described the inefficient use of grain by feeding it to livestock in order to produce animal protein for human consumption, as opposed to humans directly eating the plant foods themselves. This germane concept is accentuated further, with today’s global population at seven billion, due to the ever-decreasing land and water resources available to grow crops for livestock feed.
This same argument holds true when gifting animals to the world’s poor. It is more efficient and environmentally responsible to teach people how to use their land to grow crops to feed themselves directly than to use the land for housing gift animals and growing crops to feed them. The World Land Trust considers these livestock gift programs “environmentally unsound and economically disastrous.”
Former Indian minister Maneka Gandhi has indicated livestock gift schemes are basically fundraising tools. In fact, she claims livestock sent to impoverished areas “will add to the problems of drought and desertification” and that “very little reaches the country or the cause for which it is meant.” As Andrew Tyler, director of Animal Aid, has pointed out, “It is incontestable that desertification and further human impoverishment will follow the introduction of goats into already degraded areas.”
But back to the goat. She would require two hectares worth of grass and shrubbery every year. And inevitably, she will destroy the fertility of the land. Water and land resources for the village will be diminished. Village families will likely come into conflict with one another over the seeming unfairness of the chosen recipient. Then there’s veterinary care. Can donors truly believe poor people in Third World countries have the resources to care for these goats in the way we would like to believe? There are costs associated with this animal gift. It’s not a machine — it’s a living being. And if the livestock is to be confined in a barn, animal welfare issues of disease, infertility and premature death will arise in these already-deprived communities. There is also the question of how the goat will be treated and how humane its slaughter will be.
More fundamental to these issues is the fact that the West’s ideology of animal agriculture — responsible for environmental degradation and diseases of animal-based diets such as cancer and heart disease — is being imposed upon societies, so they inherit these problems without learning to sustainably feed themselves. These livestock gift programs inflict a life of misery and death on the “gifts” and degrade the impoverished environment — introducing non-native livestock to fragile environments is not a solution.
Donors can create a more positive and lasting impact by supporting agencies that help through the introduction of plant-based sustainable agriculture, rather than encouraging the farming of animals for short- term gain in exchange for long-term environmental and health damage. In this time of hastening climate change and global scrutiny of freshwater resources, it is at best ethnocentric, and at worst irresponsible, to impose animal agriculture onto indigenous societies that have limited water availability. For donors who are concerned, organizations such as HIPPO (Help International Plant Protein), Trees for Kenya, and Food for Life Global provide support that benefits the recipients for the long term, without exploiting animals or degrading the environment.
Patricia Tallman is an environmental policy consultant and leader of the Langley Herbivores, an animal-rights activist group. She holds a PhD in water resources engineering and environmental science.