A wealthy country helping poorer communities sounds like a good thing. But what exactly are we exporting?
According to a BBC report, Jersey cows are being used in Zambia as part of projects intended to increase farmers’ incomes, improve food security and expand milk production. Jersey Overseas Aid has provided farmers with access to Jersey cattle alongside training and support. The cows are praised because they supposedly produce “high-quality milk”, require less feed than larger breeds and cope well with hot climates. In other words, their value is being measured almost entirely by what humans can extract from them.
Deputy Carolyn Labey described Jersey’s dairy industry as “transforming opportunities” for smallholder farmers by improving household incomes, food security and rural economic development. But there is another individual involved in this supposed development story. The cow. And she barely exists in the narrative except as a production unit. The report talks about farmers producing more milk and earning more “from their animals”. That phrase tells us a lot. The animal is framed as an economic resource whose purpose is to generate income.
Jersey and Zambia are now preparing to renew a dairy partnership first signed in 2022, extending efforts aimed at strengthening Zambia’s dairy industry. This should raise a much bigger question. Why is international development being tied to expanding animal exploitation at all? If wealthy countries genuinely want to support lower-income communities, surely the goal should be helping people build secure, resilient livelihoods without making those livelihoods dependent on using someone else’s body for profit. But this is being presented almost entirely as a success story. More milk. More income. More dairy infrastructure.
What is missing is any serious consideration of the cow as an individual with interests of her own.
That omission is not trivial. It is built into the entire framing. Development should mean improving lives. It should not require us to decide that some lives exist primarily to improve ours.