ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the UN multi-donor dairy rehabilitation project in Uganda in the 1980s. Dairying plays versatile roles in the nutrition and livelihoods of smallholders and their communities. In mature dairy economies such as the USA and UK, most milk animals exist in intensive confined animal feeding operations requiring high energy use; in case studies of Uganda, India and Bangladesh, around 80 per cent of dairy sectors are informal, and many smallholders keep one or two cows for family food - but have surplus milk that could be sold. For such reasons the United Nations Development Programme and Food and Agricultural Organization (UNDP-FAO) promote dairy marketing systems to raise subsidiary incomes of small-scale farmers in peacetime or rehabilitate countries after war, by improving rural-to-urban cold chains. European Economic Community (EEC) aid was partly triggered by the high costs of storing dairy commodities, and political inability to cut farm subsidies.
