POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: Bill Gates's chickens stir development debate
Supplying poor people with livestock seems an obvious move - but is it based on a misunderstanding of the problem?
The world’s richest man Bill Gates came up with a new plan in 2016 to reduce global poverty; give every poor person a chicken. I’m not making this up. The Gates foundation has begun the first leg of this scheme, promising to donate 100,000 chickens to people living with high levels of poverty, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The cost would be about $15m. The logic is simple. Chickens are easy and cheap to take care of, they keep children healthy, they empower women, and raising and selling chickens can lift families out of dire poverty. A farmer with 40 chickens could earn about $1,000 a year — well above the extreme poverty level, which is now around $700 a year. According to Gates’s wife Melinda, they are the "ATMs of the poor" because they are easy to sell at short notice to cover day-to-day expenses. It sounds so obvious one has to ask, why did no one think of this before? Why did poor Africans not think of it before? One reason is because there is a science to chicken breeding, a...
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