Dog Food for Famine Victims!

Below are excerpts from the an article entitled "New Zealand Food Help for Kenyans is for the Dogs" By Alexander Schwabe. The rest of the article can be found here.

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"Kenya is suffering from an ongoing drought. What the young woman saw in Kenya disturbed her deeply. Upon her return to her hometown of North Canterbury in New Zealand, she told friends and family about the hunger in the eastern African country. Her stories were so heart-wrenching that a friend of her mother's, the dog-food manufacturer Christine Drummond, came up with the idea of sending 42 tons of powdered dog food to Kenya's famine victims.

Not surprisingly, the Kenyan government refused this offer. John Munyes, the Kenyan minister responsible for aid programs, said it was an insult to think his nation would accept animal food. Drummond had sought to avoid exactly this response. In order to demonstrate the sincerity of her offer, she promised that the dog food was very nutritious and actually quite tasty. She and her children, she said, mix it in with their breakfast cereal every morning.

In preparing to deliver the dog food, Drummond even developed a recipe that was tailored to the conditions in Kenya. "The first plan was to send dog biscuits, and change the vitamins," she told a Christchurch paper called The Press. "Then, when I heard there were so many little children, I couldn't send them a bicky."Instead, she developed a powder that could be mixed with water and turned into a meal. It was based primarily on corn, which is a major staple of the Kenyan diet, but also contained freeze-dried meat: beef, sheep, pork, chicken and venison. Also involved were clams, seaweed, garlic, eggs, cereals and flax.

The Kenyans were far from impressed. "The offer was very naïve and culturally insulting, given the meaning of dogs in our culture," said Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua. Drummond, he admitted, may have been trying to help, but her offer was "unacceptable."No one denies that Kenya's situation is desperate. An ongoing drought and failed harvests have led to 3.5 million people suffering from hunger. President Mwai Kibaki has announced a state of emergency. But the dog-food offer has generated shock and outrage. Zipporah Kittony, head of the Kenyan women's group Maendeleo ya Wanawake, called the offer the highest form of abuse which Kenyan women and children could be subjected to. Especially in times of drought, she said, children must be handled with dignity."