Heifer International: Nineteenth Century Aphorism

Many are aware of the nineteenth century aphorism, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It is with similar principle that an Ohio farmer, Dan West, founded Heifers for Relief in 1944. In 1938, while ladling out milk to starved child refugees of the Spanish Civil War, West thought to himself, “These children don’t need a cup, they need a cow.” Heifer International is a nonprofit organization set with the perseverance of eradicating poverty and hunger through education, giving, and communal improvement. Not only does Heifer distribute livestock to needy families worldwide, but the esteemed organization also provides training in husbandry, with the intention of promoting self-sufficiency.
A prodigious tenet of the organization is that when someone receives their aid, they must agree to “pass on the gift.” This “passing of the gift” is done by sharing cattle progeny, and by teaching other impoverished members in their community new skills in farming and agriculture. Since their incorporation in 1944, Heifer International has distributed animals to more than twenty million families in over 125 countries. Heifer International is marketed towards international families in need.
Until the 1970s, Heifer was more specifically pointed towards war-torn regions, but since then, they have focused their efforts more towards developing nations. With Heifer International’s charitable model including the fundamental “Passing of the Gift,” many assumptions are made. The most obvious assumption is that families who are gifted with cattle will fulfill their promise, ergo “passing the gift.” “Fulfilling their promise” means eventually become donors themselves. This is the chief purpose (and assumption) of this organization: that those who receive help, later give help. Heifer International also employs separate canons when assisting those in need. These distinct principles are entitled the “Twelve Cornerstones of Just and Sustainable Development.” Each cornerstone is developed on a different principle, but are all part of the purpose of Heifer’s projects. These cornerstones range from “spirituality” (the ending of hopelessness) to “gender and family focus” (where women and men equally contribute in the project’s decision making). These cornerstones work through trust and assumptions, because Heifer cannot know exactly what happens once they
leave. As briefly revealed, the valued organization is not only rooted in ending hunger and poverty but also in changing the way people reason. Heifer impresses behavior and values amongst their beneficiaries and habitués with their Twelve Cornerstones of Just and Sustainable Development. The most direct, righteous, and impactful cornerstones are accountability, sharing, nutrition, justice, agroecology, and as mentioned before, participation and spirituality. Because of the nonprofit’s complete transparency, they careen away from any “questionable” or “bad” values. It is because of the nobleness that this nonprofit can shine in its many great accolades: Reagan’s Volunteer Action Award, Bush’s Presidential End Hunger Award, Forbes magazine’s top ten charities, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant of $42.5 million, to name a few. While creating self-reliance amongst consumers, Heifer’s cornerstones serve not only to improve a family, but the entire community dynamic itself. This is done through the ways Heifer operates: instead of just giving an impoverished family food (which is finite, and can potentially bankrupt local grocery shops, thus making them even less sustainable), Heifer gives them animals and training. These distributed animals were once utterly cows (no pun intended), but since more recent policy change, animals now include: cows, pigs, chickens, goats, water buffalo, oxen, bees, llamas, frogs and rabbits. By giving the impoverished animals and training, family’s become more independent; and by making them promise to share agricultural practice techniques, and donate animal offspring to other families, their community becomes self-sufficient as a whole, and an almost perpetual source of food is constructed. To gain and maintain benefactors, Heifer International maintains complete transparency. By doing this, contributors feel more at ease, knowing exactly how their donations will be distributed. A major symbol of Heifer is the “cow that ended poverty.” This symbol is encapsulated both as the logo for the nonprofit (a leaping cow), and as a story. The story features a cow donated to an impoverished family: the cow is not only able to produce milk for the family, but also produce fertilizer for crops, create biofuel, and eventually spawn offspring. Some of the offspring are then given to other villagers in need, creating a continuous cycle—which eventually becomes near perpetual. The one cow, over time, is able to end severe hunger in the community. Although the nonprofit does ostensibly have decent intention, a large fallacy that Heifer does paint, though, is the stereotype that all Africans, Indians, and South Americans are severely destitute, which is severely condescending. Nonprofits like Heifer regularly take the most severe situations of poverty, and make it seem like the most common condition on the continent or region, in an effort to increase donations. Although using the symbol of the cow as a means of promotion is acceptable, the latter can be seen as unethical. The organization projects their agenda in terms of “costs” versus “benefits” to contributors with the claim that money donated will have up to “nine times the impact.” They claim this to be true through the “gift of giving,” where those who are helped will eventually help others. With Heifer International’s one-hundred billion dollar budget, Heifer has been and will continue to be capable in instituting global change in hunger and poverty, and the fact that it is being led by Americans only reasserts the United States role and position as the global policeman.
According to the neoliberal international relations perspective, interconnectedness between nations reduces the chances of war. Thus, United States based nonprofits intervening in foreign nations with aid should only create better relationships between these nations. With enough of these interactions, trust may be built between these nations and the United States, creating better sentiment towards the United States, and making its contemporary position in the world as a hegemon more widely
accepted. As deliberated, Heifer International’s purpose is to create self-sustainability in developing nations, and shape how people in these countries think and reason. The organization holds assumption that those who receive aid will fulfil their promise and later give aid. Heifer’s transparency builds trust within its benefactors, and has awarded it a plethora of accolades. Although the institute ostensibly upholds righteous values, it does exacerbate American perspective on individuals living in developing nations, making them seem wholly impoverished. But overall, the organization is effective in creating change and potentially strengthens United States relationships with other nations.