Introducing Angola Agro Action

In the spring of 2012 I hope to be graduating from Washington State University with a BS in Animal Science with a focus on Dairy Production and Management. My goal is to use this education and experience and apply it to developing dairy production among the people living around Bongo, Angola, where I was born and raised. People living in the area are among the 40 percent or more of the population of Angola living on less than $2 a day.

Many people are already involved in small scale farming along the riversides and raising chickens and goats for meat. These products are sold at local informal markets. Some of the produce ends up being bought by middle persons who have transportation resources taking the products to the local provincial capital of Huambo, an hour's drive away. This combination of farming, trading and access to more developed markets close by, makes it an ideal place to place a dairy. Using goats and cows to produce milk and create value added products we can develop a more vertically integrated system that puts everyday producers higher in the value chain.

My background: I grew up on Bongo Mission, in the Lepi area of Huambo province. My grandparents arrived in the country at the first of the year 1931. My dad was born there a year later. I was born on the mission when my dad was 30, and my younger sister two years later. The mission had a successful dairy that started with Brown Swiss heifers and bulls imported from South Africa in the mid 1940's.

Our family left Angola at the start of the civil war in 1975 when it became obvious that those involved with the Portuguese colonialization would be in jeopardy. Even though our family did not necessarily support colonializm, we did operate in cooperation of authorities and were white.

After 5 years of peace, my dad and I returned to Angola in 2007. I felt like I had returned home. On a subsequent visit in 2009 to help repair the water system on the mission I had an opportunity to work with my dad and some local volunteers. I also had the pleasure of meeting the young people and we bagan to teach each other our languages. I taught them a word of english and they would teach me the same word in Umbundu, the local bantu language. We used the Portuguese word as the intermediate. Portuguese is the official national language, but all rural children learn their own local native language  at home.

Angola has wealth in Oil and Diamond exports and a badly damaged infrasturcture. In the last 5 years the government has done a remarkable job improving the infrastucture. It has been a failure at re-building the human infrastructure, education and local level social economic situation is poor in the rural areas. In addition, the government is keen to develop huge agribuisiness projects in cooperation with the chinese and brazilians that do very little to address employment and devleopment at the local level. There is a place for Coffee, Sugarcane, wood cellulose, biofuel and such projects that diversify exports. I believe there is also a role for small farming cooperatives in business to benefit the members. This may lead to larger businesses that employ people, providing a social anchor in the community improving family access to food, education and mobility.

A bried dossier of this project at http://www.scribd.com/doc/52296702/Angola-Agro-Action-Dossier.