Our Food Security Journalism Award winner is…
May 30, 2022
Tom Major, a journalist with ABC News, Analysis and Investigations, is the Crawford Fund Food Security Journalism Award winner. This year’s winning article is “Can golden rice prove agricultural science has a role in ending malnutrition?”
The Crawford Fund’s Food Security Journalism Award is part of our efforts to encourage Australian journalists to delve into the important issues around global food and nutrition security.
The prize for this Award is a ‘seeing is believing’ working visit to a developing country. Now in its seventh year, we have supported radio, print and TV journalists with visits to Morocco, India, Timor Leste, Colombia and Nepal. These visits result in significant media coverage of issues related to agricultural development and food and nutrition security to a wide Australian audience.
This year’s judging panel included communications expert Edwyn Shiell, Director, Communications & Outreach at the Australian Academy of Technology & Engineering; ag science expert Dr Daniel Walker, Chief Scientist from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), and our Director of Outreach, Cathy Reade.
“This year’s entries included excellent storytelling and important issues. With the ‘guiding principle’ for the awards being that entries may touch on any topics that relate to the theme of global food security but should not have just an Australian food security/supply focus, our decision was unanimous,” said Cathy.
“We’ll now be working with Tom to identify a visit where he’ll have the opportunity to see agriculture for development in action and in the field,” said Cathy, who will be developing the program and accompanying Tom.
Having missed out on offering awards in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID travel restrictions, we will be having a second competition this year, to be launched soon and announced at our annual conference in August. Stay tuned for details!
The Crawford Fund thanks all the other entrants to this year’s award, listed below in alphabetical order:
- Farmers unaware of ozone’s impact on crop loss, by Neena Bhandari for Sci Dev Net
- Green energy exports, by Roderick Chambers, National Community Radio current affairs program “The Wire”
- Hardy Crop Anything but Run of the Millet, by Gregor Heard, Australian Community Media/Farm Online
- How the sausage gets made: the serious business of fake meat, by Donna Lu, The Guardian
- Export Pressure: Australia – Indonesia live cattle partnership being tested, by Kristy O’Brien, ABC TV Landline
- Farmer’s campaign to re-set debate over dingoes, by Michael Slezak, ABC News
- Seismic Shift, by Madeleine Stutchbery, The Weekly Times and Ag Journal
- Digging Deep: New Approach to find underground water, by Courtney Wilson, ABC TV Landline
