GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation. GRAIN says that it ‘works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.’
Here’s a report by GRAIN about the importance of milk to the livelihoods and health of poor people. GRAIN tells us about ‘people’s milk’, also known as the ‘informal sector’. Farmers and pastoralists sell milk directly to vendors. The vendors sell milk to people who want to drink it. I’m grateful to my fellow blogger Abdul Raziq Kakar at Camel, Food Security and Climate Change for drawing attention to this story.
The ‘informal’ selling of milk doesn’t involve large corporations such as Coca Cola. This catches my attention after another blogger, Tegan Tallulah at Earth Baby, wrote about the soft drinks industry. Tegan described Coca Cola ‘digging wells in water-deprived areas, taking all of the clean water for their factories and leaving the area polluted – with local people unable to do anything about it.’
A few weeks after GRAIN urged us to admire ‘people’s milk’, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) agreed. ILRI said that milk is a key tool against malnutrition.
People milk animals – cattle, goats, sheep, camels, yaks, buffaloes – in many parts of the world. You might choose to follow my ‘milk’ tag for more about this great food.
It’s great to hear about small scale social enterprises like this. Personally I’m vegan, but I do appreciate that milk is an important and precious foodstuff to many people around the world. Thanks for mentioning my post about Innocent being brought out by Coca Cola, I’m glad you found it interesting!
Interesting and horrifying.
Ha! Yeah that about sums it up!
Reblogged this on drbausman's Blog.
Thank you.