For any media enquiries please contact our Public Awareness Coordinator Ms Cathy Reade
The Crawford Fund’s public awareness campaign supports Australian working journalists to visit agricultural research for development projects in developing countries. Over the years destinations have included East Timor, Laos, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Syria, Tajikistan, Kenya, Solomon Islands, Vietnam, Thailand, Peru, Mexico and the Philippines. These 'seeing is believing' reports provide first-hand accounts exemplifying approaches to the betterment of agriculture, fisheries and forestry in developing countries through agricultural research and training.
Plans are underway for support to be given for journalist visits in 2011 to East Africa, India and Indonesia. These will be reported in the newsletter and on our website as they are completed.
A few photos of journalists ‘in action’ are provided below:
Interviewing well-known food policy expert, Prof
Per Pinstrup-Anderson at IFPRI conference,
Delhi.
Annabelle Homer from ABC Rural and Deanna Lush from Rural Press are reporting throughout their separate national networks on their visit to India in February 2011. They reported from an international conference on agriculture and nutrition organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute, then visited ACIAR project field sites with ACIAR staff and project leaders and Indian collaborators, followed by a visit to the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics to view work there carried out by ICRISAT, the International Water Management Institute, the International Livestock Research Institute and the World Vegetable Centre.
All media coverage from the trip can be found here Media Coverage in India February 2011
Kerry Straight and Chris Lockyer from the popular ABC TV Landline program enjoy the taste sensation of durian fruit with ACIAR Vietnam staff Geoff Morris and Nguyen Thi Thanh An – the 2010 visit resulted in three ABC TV Landline stories related to ACIAR projects on fruit flies and aquaculture.
ABC Journalist Kendall Jackson with local children in Syria during a visit to the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas. Kendall filed around 20 stories from the visit which were played throughout the ABC network. Cosmos Science magazine journalist Fiona McDonald also visited ICARDA and will reporting in 2011.
ABC journalist Sarina Locke rides the becak in Jogjakarta in 2009. In a two-week visit to West Timor, Bali and Java as part of a media outreach to mark the celebrations of ACIAR’s 25-year research partnership with Indonesia. Her visit led to stories broadcast across a range of national and State radio programs on ABC rural, Radio National and Radio Australia as well as a radio documentary and a series of web features with photos from the trip. Sarina went on to win national and international awards for the documentary from the visit.
Rural Press journalist, Ashley Walmsley, waiting to catch a bus on a busy Taipei street. While timing could have been better to avoid Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan in 2009, the visit organised for Ashley to attend the forum ‘Food in Health Security (FIHS) in the Asia-Pacific Region’ resulted in numerous articles and features in a broad range of Rural Press newspapers and magazines around the country.
Judith Ellen (left), Weekend Australian and Sue Neales, News Ltd in Peru. In addition to organising a range of interviews in Australia, two separate visits to the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Peru were arranged to highlight the International Year of the Potato in 2008. A visit by an ABC TV Landline crew and another for Judith Elen, the Weekend Australian travel/food writer and Sue Neales from News Ltd (who reported to State/metro papers) were very successful, with extensive press coverage.