Row over Sh10m Milk Campaign

A row over Sh10 million milk advertising campaign to popularise processed milk has boiled over. Interestingly, the so-called 'safe milk campaign' is being faulted, not for what it says about creamery made milk, whose health-promoting qualities are generally a matter of unanimity, but rather what it says about other substitutes, notably raw milk, in its adverts. The unfolding spat pits the Kenya Dairy Board against a group of NGOs and research organisations, speaking for the voiceless small-scale dairy farmers and the informal milk business.

Supported by the Board and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, it has been substantially financed by the country's main milk processors in a dizzying advertising blitz, especially in the country's mainstream electronic media. But its aggressive message has left a sour taste in the mouths of the NGOs.

In the ads, a number of experts are summoned, who proceed to label a number of tags on raw milk, including the implication that sellers in the informal end of the market regularly add formalin and other preservatives like hydrogen peroxide to their products, rendering it unhealthy. It is such 'generalised and unsubstantiated' lines which the civil society campaigners say would have the overall effect of strangling growth in an important segment of the milk trade on which many consumers, farmers and milk traders rely: the informal sector.

The board and the processors in its corner would like to see the sale of raw milk stamped out at all cost. The NGOs, however, counter that it is legitimate because there is ready demand for the product and it is cheaper. The NGOs also argue that there is a need to separate the illegal wing of the informal sector market, which is largely controlled by faceless middlemen obsessed with volumes and longevity, from the rest of this category, for instance, farmers who supply to local users which they say need to be encouraged rather than vilified.

The truth is that since the heyday of Kenya Cooperatives Creameries, which could absorb as much as 1.2 million litres daily, Kenya has never had adequate capacity to take up most of the milk that its farmers produce. It is testament to the importance of the informal sector and the underdeveloped level of local processing that the latter only accounts for 14% of total milk sales in the market. Even with the setting up of several processors following the liberalisation of the industry in 1992, local capacity is still stuck at around 600,000 litres a day, against a daily production of over one million litres.

According to data gleaned from a secondary research dome by the NGO lobbyists, raw milk markets account for 86% of all milk sold in the country, supporting over 800,000 smallholder dairy farmers and supporting about 350,000 employees. Some 23% is sold by hawkers on the streets, while 42% is sold to consumers directly from the farm, with urban milk bars taking up the remaining 15%.

It would seem that KDB is faced with classical regulators' headache here. Whenever a regulator overtly supports any effort to enforce quality standards in any industry, it always runs the risk of being seen to be siding with the big players. But a senior dairy technologist with KDB, Ms. Joyce Kiio is emphatic that the technical underpinning of the NGOs' argument - especially their two main grounds: that boiling milk is almost as efficient as pasteurisation in killing germs and that most of the hawked milk is not adulterated anyway - are wobbly.