ARLINGTON, Va, January 9, 2012 – In his book, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, Reverend Sun Myung Moon makes the intriguing prediction that world hunger can be solved in part, through fish farming. Reading this set me to wondering, “To what extent have people already been attempting to reduce hunger through aquiculture?”
A search in Google turned up a 2007 article in Scientific American on fish farming in the landlocked eastern African nation of Malawi, a country with one of the most impoverished populations in the world.
This article tells about a project undertaken by researchers and workers from the WorldFish Center, in which they created fish ponds for 1,200 rural households. The most encouraging result of the effort was the reduction of malnutrition for children from forty-five percent to fifteen percent in the area served!
The fish ponds are roughly 2,000 square feet in size, and are stocked with tilapias, a fish that grows quite well in pond environments and is native to Africa. Tilapias, unlike many other fish, do not need to be fed with other, smaller fish. They can thrive on vegetable matter such as the bran derived from rice or maize crops.
In addition to easing malnutrition, the aquiculture experiment has enabled poor farmers to double their incomes. This is in part due to the fact that in drought times, usually around two months in this region, farmers can use water from their fish ponds to irrigate fields of maize, thus allowing them to produce a second, off-season crop.
Finally, the production of food through fish farming seems to be very efficient. According to the article, it takes an astounding 70,000 gallons of water to raise a kilogram of beef. By contrast, one can produce a kilogram of tilapia with 3,000 gallons of water.
Perhaps in the future, fish farming will help more and more people in hunger-stricken areas of the world to raise their own food and enable them to feed their children through their own efforts.
To find the Scientific American report on the Malawi experiment, follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/7brezz5
“Solving the food crisis cannot be put off for even a moment. Even now, some twenty thousand people around the world die of hunger-related causes every day. We cannot afford to be apathetic just because we and our immediate families are not facing hunger … We cannot build a world of peace without first resolving the food issue.” – From As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen
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