“Every day when I get up, I know that I can make a difference in someone’s life and can make contribution to society”, Pasha Saud, Director Corporate Affairs and Dairy Development Manager in Pakistan, starts his story. “Here in Pakistan, over 8 million families make a living out of the milk produced by their cows. However, the lack of knowledge about dairy farming is a major problem. Through the Dairy Development Programme (DDP) we try to provide support in this by means of trainings and exchange of knowledge. “It is our goal to make a contribution to the Pakistan economy and to help the small-scale dairy farmers improve their living conditions and enable them to offer their children a good future. Apart form this, we offer a reasonable price for high-quality milk.”

Winning in the market with local milk

“Our operating company in Pakistan is largely dependent on fresh milk. By now, we as, FrieslandCampina know like no other how important it is to get the milk at our plants in a sustainable possible way. We also think it is important that our dairy farmers remain loyal to FrieslandCampina, so we do all we can to achieve this. We can guarantee the farmers volumes through our local brands and make sure they are given the right price for the milk they supply. This will eventually help us to win in the market.”

Speech memos through WhatsApp

“We daily keep in contact with local dairy farmers. This is really crucial. What problems are they faced with? How can we support them in tackling these? The coming up of the corona virus has made this quite challenging. We had to think of alternatives in a relatively short period in order to keep communicating. Therefore, we frequently used WhatsApp, for example. The dairy farmers recorded speech memos or sent photos and videos with questions. In this way we remained involved. We still help dairy farmers on a daily basis, for instance when collecting the milk, with issues such as How to deal with COVID-19? or What measures are to be taken at the dairy farm? Today, we can visit the dairy farms again for conducting trainings. Of course, all this in small groups and following the required rules.”

No litre of milk lost

Pasha looks back on the past few months with a positive feeling. Despite all adjustments made, no milk supplied by the local dairy farmers was lost. “On the contrary: we processed even more milk, because dairy farmers could not sell this themselves at the local market. It was important to us to protect dairy farmers, so we bought extra milk and we fully committed ourselves to valorise this. And with success. I am really proud that I can say that not even one litre of milk was lost.”

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