Shal­iza Has­sanali

Three peo­ple were award­ed the In­ter-Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co­op­er­a­tion on Agri­cul­ture (IICA) and the Caribbean Agri­cul­tur­al Re­search and De­vel­op­ment In­sti­tute (CAR­DI) Ex­cel­lence in Agri­cul­tur­al Jour­nal­ism Awards. Tak­ing the first prize in the print cat­e­go­ry on April 17 was Lin­da Hinds with her sub­mis­sion "Bring­ing rain­wa­ter har­vest­ing to the To­co Re­gion" of the East­ern Voice. While El­speth Dun­can of Gayelle TV cap­tured the tele­vi­sion prize with her en­try "Prep's Gar­den" with Saj­jad Hamid walk­ing away with the Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ist award for his piece "Boon­doo the sweet pota­to man." The win­ners each re­ceived a cash prize of US $800. Present were IICA's lo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of T&T Gregg Rawl­ins, Dr Ar­ling­ton Ches­ney ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of CAR­DI and Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Arnold Pig­gott.

LEFT: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of IICA in T&T Gregg Rawl­ins.

A to­tal of 19 sub­mis­sions were re­ceived in four of the cat­e­gories con­test­ed, print, tele­vi­sion, ra­dio and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist. The theme of the com­pe­ti­tion was "Achiev­ing Food Se­cu­ri­ty in T&T as a Na­tion­al Pri­or­i­ty". Pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean Me­dia Work­ers Wes­ley Gib­bings said it was ap­par­ent that the en­tries re­ceived did not ful­ly rep­re­sent the best jour­nal­is­tic work on the sub­ject in the lo­cal me­dia. Gib­bings who spoke on be­half of the pan­el of judges at Ho­tel Nor­mandie, St Ann's, ad­mit­ted that some of the ex­perts quib­bled over some key de­tails, stat­ing that there ex­ist­ed wide gaps in the qual­i­ty of print ver­sus broad­cast sub­mis­sions.

Gib­bings said that peo­ple need to re­mem­ber that one of the most in­dis­pens­able as­sets of a jour­nal­ist is his or her sense of hu­mil­i­ty. Gib­bings point­ed out that poor jour­nal­is­tic prac­tices very of­ten in­vite op­pres­sive of­fi­cial be­hav­iour, al­most as much as ex­cel­lent jour­nal­ism does. Pig­gott who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of the me­dia in shap­ing pub­lic opin­ion, stat­ing that the com­pe­ti­tion's ob­jec­tives was main­ly to fos­ter greater un­der­stand­ing of food and nu­tri­tion se­cu­ri­ty, in­crease in­ter­ac­tion and cre­ate new part­ner­ship be­tween the agri­cul­ture sec­tor and the me­dia.