Animal Pressure Group Challenges Aid Agencies

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As the G8 global poverty debate hots up…..

Animal Pressure Group Challenges Aid Agencies


to Abolish Animal Donor Schemes

As the G8 Summit (Gleneagles, July 6-8 (2005) prepares to tackle the issue of global poverty, national campaigning group, Animal Aid, has issued a stark challenge to three poverty relief agencies: stop providing living animals to farmers in poorer countries.

Many ‘developing’ countries rely on aid agencies to help feed their undernourished. Several, including Christian Aid, Oxfam and Send a Cow, now supply living animals to serve as breeding stock for meat and milk. But farming animals is an inefficient, unsustainable and problematic way of producing food. Apart from those who feed on pasture where it is difficult to grow crops, farmed animals use more food calories than they produce in the form of meat. They also compete directly with people for other precious resources, notably water.

Poorer countries do not need aid in the form of live animals - who require feeding, bedding, shelter and veterinary care - but sustainable, drought-resistant crops.

Despite the problems associated with animal farming, per capita consumption of meat has doubled over the last decade in poorer countries and it is predicted that 80% of the worldwide increase in meat consumption will take place in the developing world. Aid agencies, therefore, need to diminish the role of farmed animals in their food aid policies.

Animal Aid has written to the heads of the leading ‘animal donor’ agencies asking them to abandon their counter-productive initiatives.

Says Animal Aid Campaigner Kelly Slade: ‘At the time of the 1984 famine when Bob Geldof was singing “feed the world”, Ethiopia was exporting feed crops to the UK to feed our livestock. The Western meat habit is costing people in developing countries their lives.’

Animal Aid