A children’s charity supported by the global meat industry has announced its first field project for combating poverty and hunger.
The Six-Second Project, which is a non-profit organisation, is seeking to raise US$150,000 through meat industry corporate sponsorship to build a commercial-sized aquaponics system in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
According to the charity, aquaponics combines hydroponics – a soil-less way of growing crops – with aquaculture to provide sustainable growth of fruit, vegetable and fish production for smallholder farms in South African communities. The creation of these systems will help in the community, which struggles with chronic hunger due to high poverty levels and a lack of land, resources and food production knowledge.
A community with the unique aquaponics system can produce 10 times the amount of food in the same amount of space used in traditional farming, but with 85% less water. The system uses a rain water catchment, does not need chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides or fungicides, and can operate on solar power. Six-Second Project said the combination of solar energy and the fact that no chemicals are needed, means the system is an “environmentally sustainable means of addressing hunger and poverty”.
Additionally, the project will allow farmers to sell excess fish and produce generated by the system, which will add a financial income to households that would have had no financial help.
Founder and CEO of the Six-Second Project Jody Falletta Carman said: “The $150,000 raised through the meat industry will provide the necessary technical knowledge, business planning, and training so that the system is ultimately self-sustaining for the community. Our implementation partner on the project is INMED Partnerships for Children, a Virginia-based non-profit organisation with a 26-year history of working to improve children’s health and nutrition across the globe.”
The Six-Second Project was launched at the World Meat Congress in Paris in June earlier this year to raise the awareness of children dying from starvation. The name of the charity came from shocking statistics that stated a child died from hunger every six seconds.
