Foreign Affairs Committee on March 26th, 2015

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

I have a question, Mr. Lambert.

With regard to egg farming, which I know nothing about, are there specific challenges in countries like Africa that are different from those here in Canada? I'm thinking of things like diseases that affect chickens over there but that don't exist here in Canada. Are things easier in some ways or harder?

[Tim Lambert]

That's a good question.

For many of the diseases they have, we have dealt with them here. They're more prevalent there because they don't have access to veterinary care, etc., the way we do. They have issues around managing temperature. They have issues around resources like electricity and whatnot.

We've found a system designed by a company called Big Dutchman that is specifically designed for use in sub-Saharan Africa. It's very simple. You don't need electricity. You don't need supplemental lighting for the birds. It's a very simple tier of cages. The water is fed by gravity from a little cistern. There's a little hand crank that moves the feed cart along, so you get uniform distribution of the feed. It's a perfect little system and it's totally scalable.

Yes, there are a lot of challenges. There are challenges with predators, which makes having free-run or free-range birds a particular challenge, but as near as we can tell from our research and work in Mozambique, we've found a model that will work extremely well in sub-Saharan Africa.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I have a last very quick question.

I know very little about Swaziland as well, and you have described some truly horrendous statistics about HIV/AIDS and life expectancy. For my benefit, please tell me if Swaziland was always a poor place, or has it become the way it is because of the high rate of HIV? It truly has monumental challenges. Was there a time when Swaziland was potentially a much healthier country in terms of its economy and other things?

[Janine Maxwell]

During the days of colonialism—and most of the countries in Africa were colonized—Swaziland was a protectorate under British law. It had the benefit of not.... There are two sides to it. They weren't colonized totally, but the British were there, and they had a deal with King Sobhuza to be in the country. When the British left, there were funds that went back and forth, There were deals that were made. I don't believe that the country was ever a strong.... Certainly, it was never a first-world nation. It has always been a small, one-tribe, one-language country. However, AIDS has totally changed the face of the country.

The difference between Swaziland and the rest of the African nations is that in most African countries, certainly in sub-Saharan Africa, people live in tribes or in villages. You've heard the expression that it takes a village to raise a child. There has been parent mortality since the beginning of time. A parent gets eaten by a lion, the village brings the children into the village, and they get absorbed. But Swazis live in homesteads. They do not live in villages. They are polygamists, so you might have a man with six wives. Each of these six wives wants to give him as many children as she possibly can because that shows honour to him, and it shows wealth. Also, it's her insurance plan. It's her savings plan for when she is old: someone will be able to tend the garden and bring water for her.

Because of the high infant mortality rate, she might end up with six of the nine children she has given birth to. The man goes off to South Africa or somewhere to get a job so that he can fund his family. He has sex while he's gone. He gets infected with HIV and brings it back. When he comes back, he infects all six wives.

If it were a different country, he might infect his wife and his girlfriend, or maybe two of his wives, but because polygamy is very much an important part of their culture, he has infected all six or eight wives. Then, when they all die, you have a homestead where there are 36, 45, or 50 children. That, I think, is the difference between what is happening in Swaziland and other nations being ravaged by HIV. Those children aren't being absorbed back into a village because they don't live in a village environment. Their village was their homestead, and the homestead is now void of adults.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Goldring, this is our second round. You have five minutes.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for appearing here today.

Mr. Lambert, I was an executor for my brother-in-law's estate. He had a 10,000-chicken/egg farm, so I have a little of knowledge about it. I was also in Ghana a couple of years ago at a university in the northern region. There, they had hatchery machines, two big hatchery machines that could produce many chicks for the area for the farmers in the area. They're broken. They are down because of a relay, maybe, or a broken wire or something, and they don't have the capability to repair it.

When you're setting up these farms, do you also set up hatcheries for the continuation of it in order to supply them with the chicks to raise to lay the eggs? Then, of course, the other end of the cycle is that once their laying period is over, that's again more protein from the chicken. How do you replace to give the sustainability? Do you include hatcheries into your plan?

[Tim Lambert]

In the project in Swaziland we do not, because the commercial producer there, a company called Eagles Nest, has already agreed to supply out of their own. As they produce through their hatchery system pullets for their layer facilities, they will provide the pullets that we need. They also own a feed company, so we will purchase the feed from them. The work on the hatchery side is taken care of in this case.

In other projects, it will have to be built in as part of them. In fact, one of our project team members on the Swazi project is a gentlemen named Brad Lawson, who happens to own a hatchery in western Canada, so we have that expertise.

But you raise a really important point, because that can be the demise of a lot of projects: a relay switch fails and no one knows what that is or how to fix it. That's why I used the example, with Mr. Garneau's question, about creating or adapting a system so that it fits within the resources and skill sets they have.

There is another thing that there is a potential for in Africa. Where there is some commercial activity, where most of the major international breeding companies and hatchery companies, such as Hy-Line and Lohmann, are actively building their footprint in Africa, it may be possible in many projects to start the production at the point of lay. You have the chicks hatched. It's done by a professional international company. They are called pullets up until the point they start laying, at about 18 or 19 weeks. You get them delivered at that age and they go into the lay facility. You take a lot of the technical need out of the equation, and then, as you can build it, you can add it in. You don't tackle that right away.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

One of the other things we had to be extremely cautious about was cleanliness for people going into the barns and all that. As a matter of fact, strangers were not invited in, period, and it was only the people who had to actually do the work in there who were in the barns. There's no tourism, if you like, because it's an absolutely clean environment.

With regard to the type of chick or pullet brought there, are they a particular breed that is resistant to some of these diseases? I would think that it would be difficult to control the environment if you don't have electricity and you don't have the air conditioning and other things to create that clean environment. Is there a particular breed that you use?

[Tim Lambert]

It's a breed developed by Hy-Line International, the Silver Brown. When we went to Mozambique—layers will typically lay between 19 and 52 weeks of age, say, or even go later—those birds were 60 weeks of age and they were in amazing shape. Mortality was really low. They were still producing a lot of eggs and were very healthy. I don't know that they're specifically adapted to sub-Saharan Africa, but I know they're quite robust, and that is exactly the same breed that we will use.

Also, you're absolutely right. At the end of the lay cycle, you have a whole new source of protein in the chickens, so that's where the part about sustainability comes in. You use everything.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Yes. It's a pretty efficient commodity.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Welcome, Mr. Sullivan.

The floor is yours, sir, for five minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you.

I too am incredibly moved by what you've done and what you are doing. It's an amazing story. I want to thank you for being, in some way, Canada's emissaries to Swaziland.

I want to ask about how you are getting money. Where is the funding coming from? In Canada, I've heard that on the part of the diaspora here it is incredibly expensive and incredibly difficult to send money to Africa. There are quite a few diasporas in my riding, not necessarily from Swaziland—I don't know—but certainly from many parts of Africa. The average cost of sending money to Swaziland is between 15% and 30% of the amount being sent. Companies that have tried to start up in Canada find that the banks here make it incredibly difficult for them because it's eating into their own profit.

How much of what you know is going into Swaziland is part of the remittance system from other countries, in particular Canada, and how much is coming from aid and charity?

[Ian Maxwell]

I'll answer that. Thank you for that question.

Heart for Africa has a foundation that is registered in Canada, as well as a charity that is registered here. We raise funds through private sources. We don't have government funding and haven't approached government in Canada for funding or grants at this point.

In Canada we have a small presence, but we are very efficient. I would say that our administrative costs are about 7%, and the balance goes to Swaziland.

When we registered the charity, in our articles, we were working in Africa, so from the CRA standpoint, we are sending money out of the country to promote these projects that we're working on in Swaziland. We haven't run into very many issues in sending money. Like I said, about 93% of what we collect goes to Swaziland. We're also on the ground in Swaziland. We have a Heart for Africa charity set up within their laws and legal system there. We manage the funds to make sure that every dime is stretched into a quarter.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Is 100% of what you spend in Swaziland then coming from Heart for Africa? Also, are you aware of the difficulties of the homesteaders in receiving remittances from other countries? Part of what you talked about was microloans. Are there any other sources of funding coming to those individuals from overseas?

[Janine Maxwell]

We don't do microloans. That's not part of our project. All the funds for Project Canaan come from either Heart for Africa Canada or Heart for Africa U.S. We also have a charity in Taiwan.

All the donations that come are managed by us and our board there to make sure that the funds are spent on.... If we're building an egg farm and we're putting in the pad for the foundation, 100% of the money that goes to Swaziland goes into that pad. I've not heard of the situation that you're talking about, with money going.... I don't know where it would go, because it goes from our bank account here to our bank account there.

But we're not distributing funds to people living in homesteads. We distribute food, hot food and cooked meals, so they can't take them and sell them. The children get a hot meal in a bowl for them to eat.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Is security for your operation an issue given that you're a place where there's a lot of food and there are a lot of hungry people around you?

[Ian Maxwell]

I think that whenever you're in a third world country where poverty is a very large problem, security is always a problem. We have 24-hour security at our children's campus and at our front gate. Violent crime is really not an issue. It's more that people are stealing things and food and stuff like that.

We employ 250 people as workers. I can tell you right now that we grow 60 tonnes of maize on the property and, yes, some of that disappears in their pockets, but on a grand scale, we don't really suffer from that kind of problem.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Hawn, we're going to finish the round with you.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all of you for what you're doing.

As it happens, at the end of April I'm going to be part of a little awareness-raising project with RESULTS Canada. It's called “Live Below the Line”. My budget will be $8.75 for five days—to eat and drink—so I suspect chicken parts, the cheap chicken parts, and eggs will probably figure into my $8.75.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I want to go back to the HIV/AIDS thing. I spent a little time in Tanzania in this last year. It has issues with this as well. Some of it is cultural and a lack of education. In Tanzania, for example, whatever component homosexuality plays in the AIDS situation, officially homosexuality does not exist in Tanzania because it's illegal, so therefore, quote-unquote, it doesn't exist, and therefore there's a lack of education on the risks and so on. Is there the same sort of cultural challenge in Swaziland with public education in that area?

[Janine Maxwell]

There's a lot because it's the hub right now, because it has the highest HIV rate. When Uganda was at its peak, that's where the epicentre was, and now Swaziland would be considered the epicentre for HIV and AIDS. So there's a lot of education. If students are in school, they're being educated. If they're not in school, it's a bigger problem.

On the homosexuality issue, I'm not sure whether...I've never seen that or heard.... There's really no conversation around that. I don't know whether it's illegal or not. The bigger issue, really, is rape. The bigger issue is incest.

I have a lot of people who come and say that we need to talk to them more about using condoms. There are condoms everywhere, in every government office. You cross the border and they look like candy wrappers. You have to tell the children not to eat them.

But the bigger issue is hunger, and poverty drives people to desperation. It's a hopeless nation. When people are hopeless, when men don't have purpose and they're drinking, they're raping the girls. I would say that 95% of all the women in Swaziland have been raped.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Obviously kids are going to be born with it. What's the incidence of that? It must be pretty high.