Hip hip Hippo
Tom Lane peeps beneath the surface of world aid and comes up with a rousing cheer…
The faces of starving children are one of the most emotive images of this century. But neither cause nor cure is as obvious as we are led to believe. Some aid agencies ignore the questions entirely but pretend to know the answers. Help us to send a cow, they say, a couple of goats or a dozen chickens. Britain’s new position as a food pariah has put the mockers on that, of course, but sending livestock to poor countries never was the solution – in fact, it is part of the problem, as the article on p.15 makes clear.
Christian Aid, one of the best aid charities, is funding a battery egg production unit in Palestine and its rationale is disturbing: “We have no policy on discouraging the rearing of livestock or on the welfare of animals. We have to respect the choices that communities make.” A charity which has done wonderful work on ending impoverishment is also contributing to it, in this instance.
There is just one small voice offering an alternative to such schemes and it’s a charity called Hippo – an acronym for Help International Plant Protein Organisation. It provides emergency relief for the hungry in the less developed world but just as importantly it encourages people to grow their own food – not meat or dairy but plant protein.
Hippo’s logic is so simple that even Homer Simpson could understand it. Why wastefully feed millions of tons of soya to animals when it could feed far more people directly? It has nearly 50 per cent high-quality protein, is rich in iron and calcium and all kinds of other vitamins and minerals, keeps without refrigeration, has low fat, no waste, no food poisoning bugs and isn’t cruel to animals. “Doh!”
‘Textured vegetable protein’ – not the most poetic description and nor is it when reduced to initials, TVP. But this high-quality processed food can feed 60 people from the same amount of land that would feed two people on meat – and much more healthily. Viva! has rehearsed the arguments in favour of this choice over and over again and there are the first signs that maybe people are beginning to listen.
Currently, Hippo is supporting projects in various parts of Africa and one
in Europe. In Uganda, a group of local people are running a small soya food
factory with ancient equipment but are desperate for a TVP extruder. The
cost secondhand would be £50,000. At Keyevunze, they are supporting
the training of 120 health workers who are showing people how to improve
their diets by growing soya. Results are already beginning to show with a
reduction in Kwashiorkor – a disease of poor nutrition.
The Nigerian Vegetarian Society is in a very similar situation to Uganda and Hippo is offering help and advice. At Nakura in Kenya, Hippo is contributing towards a vegan school and orphanage. In poverty-stricken Malawi, Hippo is working with the regional agricultural department to introduce soya as a crop to local villagers. They are helping to construct a small reservoir for irrigation and providing a soya mill to process the beans. Their work in Europe is principally educating people to change their lifestyles.
Hippo is the creation of an impassioned man called Neville Heath Fowler, who finds it hard to pull his punches: “Either we can go on squandering the planet’s natural resources through ever-increasing consumption until disaster strikes on a global scale, or we can develop less wasteful ways of living.”
The idea for the charity came about in 1992 when Neville and his wife Hazel went to work in Ethiopia to design the country’s first sub-surface drainage system. Knowing that goat would be the staple food, they took their own supply of TVP – chunks and mince. When customs officials ripped open the packets at Addis Ababa airport and demanded to know what these strange dry things were, “soya meat”, replied Neville. “It was put to the test by several sets of crunching teeth. ‘Very good’, was the unanimous verdict, which says more for the politeness of Ethiopians than the palatability of dry TVP.”
The idea for Hippo was not long in coming: “If only some of the cotton fields could be devoted to soya, we dreamed, and if people could learn to value it as the miracle of nutrition that it is. Then saplings such as those which the goats routinely destroyed could grow into spreading trees. Perhaps Ethiopia could then begin to recover the forests it had lost, climate change would be reversed and soil erosion arrested. And this could happen all over the world. If only we could deliver the antidote to the diseased western idea that progress is synonymous with meat.”
When it’s put like that, the sheer common sense, urgency and logic of it all is mind blowing. Nine years later Neville and Hazel are fully embarked on their antidote and while still a small and struggling antidote, what they are administering is sanity itself. They deserve everyone’s support.
Hippo can be contacted at Llangynog, Carmarthen SA33 5BS.
E: hippocharity@ukgateway.net