February 5, 2025
The Crawford Fund’s work to highlight good news stories around our efforts and those of our partners in capacity building and research for food and nutrition security always faces stiff competition for attention.
Nevertheless, the Crawford Fund, marking the 40th anniversary of Sir John Crawford’s passing and determined to reflect on his vision, managed to attract our fair share of coverage raising awareness of the benefits of international agricultural research and capacity building in developing countries and Australia.
Following is a reflection on the year that was 2024, and a few highlights of what we achieved in both traditional and social media coverage to raise awareness of food and nutrition security issues, our work and that of our partners. From biosecurity partnerships between Australia and PNG, animal feed from flies, to ‘senile’ coconut plantations, the doomsday vault and the importance of cattle in Africa, we were proud to share it all.
Highlights include:
Food Security Journalism Award Winners Hit the Road
Cathy Reade, our Director of Outreach, has taken three food security journalism award winners on their separate, specially developed trips. Natalie Parletta travelled to the World Vegetable Centre and had features in The Guardian newspaper and Cosmos Science Magazine. And then, Brett Worthington travelled to ICARDA in Morocco, with additional support from DFAT Council on Australia Arab Relations, and had national reports across the ABC, Radio National and ABC News Radio, reported here.
We awarded two Food Security Journalism Awards in 2024. The winners were Pip Courtney, ABC TV Landline for Cows for Cambodia – Changing Lives One Cow at a Time and Emma Field, ABC Rural East Timor and Victorian agricultural scientists helping control African Swine Fever.
Then, in December, Cathy and Pip Courtney, the well-known presenter of ABC TV Landline, travelled to the Philippines with the Landline crew – cameraman Glen Armstrong and sound and photography specialist Cam Lang. We look forward to seeing the resulting stories air on ABC soon. Plans are now underway with further visits to Indonesia and Vietnam.
Spotlight on NSW International Agricultural Researchers
Leading NSW agricultural researchers involved in Crawford Fund training and mentoring and ACIAR research featured in a series of articles by Hayley Warden in The Land newspaper and across Australian Country Media mastheads in other States digitally. The comprehensive and interesting series featured Dr Lester Burgess, Dr Richard Trethowan, Professor Deirdre Lemerle, Dr Matt Champness, Dr Cooper Schouten, Dr Robyn Alders and Professor Lee Baumgartner.
THE Food and Nutrition Security Event of the Year
In August, of course, our conference enabled us to focus attention on the theme of partnership and collaboration with national TV, radio and podcast interviews involving around a dozen speakers. Some of the diverse coverage included a feature with our Pacific speakers who highlighted the need to invest in local institutions and communities on Radio National; a focus on the global food security role of Australian bush tucker on national current affairs program The Wire, and a chat about the career journey of one of our scholars on ABC, (starts 49m05s).
Highlighting VIPs and collaborations
The Fund continues to engage and assist VIPs from the global food security network during their visits to Australia. Interviews were arranged for a report on ABC News (37m30s) on the food security and research impacts of the heatwave in Asia, as well as on Food security impacts of current Avian Flu Outbreak (17m45s). Two interviews were organised during the visit of the Director General of WorldFish, and Grains Central reported the collaboration between ICRISAT, UWA and Murdoch Universities showing greater genetic diversity and variations in wild chickpea that could dramatically accelerate crop improvement in modern chickpea. We finished the year with a well-attended public event in Canberra – Food Security, Climate Resilience and Innovation – a panel discussion and networking reception co-hosted with CSIRO to coincide with the visit to Australia by Dr Agnes Kalibata, President, AGRA. Dr Kalibata, who presented the 2021 Sir John Crawford Memorial Address, has a distinguished track record as an agricultural scientist, policy maker and thought leader. Interviews were organised with the National Community Current Affairs’ The Wire, ABC Rural, the rural weekly papers and a special half hour podcast with DevPolicy Talks.
Social media went off!
Our social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram) for the year generated 584,137 impressions and 32,691 post engagements (likes, shares, and comments), marking around 30 per cent growth in engagement compared to the previous reporting period. The Crawford Fund has now amassed an impressive total of 17,604 followers across all four of its channels, with 4,879 new followers gained throughout 2024, this marks a 189 per cent boost in new follower growth compared to 2023.
In addition, the Crawford Fund YouTube channel gained 44,593 impressions, 5,699 views, and 29 likes, with 140 of the channel’s 216 subscribers acquired in 2024. 60 per cent of views came from females while 40 per cent of views were recorded from males.
All Crawford Fund-associated hashtags and topics performed exceptionally well in 2024. #NextGenAg4D was mentioned 391 times and gathered 3.68 million impressions, a 77 per cent increase since the last reporting period. The #24CFConf was mentioned 486 times and recorded 6.56M impressions.
NextGen owned Insta
Our Instagram campaign highlighting the activities of our student awardees, mentors and trainers while in-country and in the field has gone from strength to strength. The images and experiences they shared brought life and colour to the work we do in so many different countries. For example our Student Awardees reported from Brazil (Rafaela Barbosa de Andrade Aragao) Fiji (Loic Fery, Nick Metherall), India (Trevor Volp, Japan (Karthiga Kumanan), Kenya (Geoffrey Wanjika, Bek Ash), Laos (Francesca Earp), Malaysia (Ella McLennan), Pakistan (Faisan ul Hasan), Samoa (Ella Lockley), Solomon Islands (Matthew Roscher, Bethany Smith, Leandra Fernandes), South Korea (Megan Moran), Timor-Leste (Duc Bui) and Vietnam (Hong Viet Duong).
A summary listing of the 2024 media coverage is available here.
We are already preparing for bigger and better impact in 2025 – spreading good news stories about agriculture for development and sharing our impact in training, mentoring, NextGen and outreach activities with you.
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