?Five prizes are at stake in the Agri­cul­tur­al Jour­nal­ism Award in­tro­duced by the In­ter­Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co-op­er­a­tion on Agri­cul­ture (IICA) and the Caribbean Agri­cul­tur­al Re­search In­sti­tute (CAR­DI) last Tues­day at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain. The theme for the awards is: Achiev­ing Food Se­cu­ri­ty in T&T: A Na­tion­al Pri­or­i­ty. One win­ner from each of the cat­e­gories of print, tele­vi­sion, ra­dio, and im­ages (pho­tog­ra­phy, car­toons, draw­ings) will re­ceive a cash award of US$800. Me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions car­ry­ing the win­ning en­tries will re­ceive spe­cial recog­ni­tion. As an added mea­sure, a Spe­cial Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ism Award is on of­fer to non-pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists of all ages.

In an­nounc­ing the award, co­or­di­na­tor, Dr Kris Ram­per­sad said the com­pe­ti­tion was to cre­ate a genre that will give agri­cul­ture the sta­tus of pol­i­tics, crime, and busi­ness in our news­rooms, and hope­ful­ly go to­wards in­sti­tu­tion­al­ism in me­dia op­er­a­tions of the agri­cul­ture beat, the agri­cul­ture re­porter and even the agri­cul­ture desk or bu­reau. "We en­vi­sion that this ex­er­cise will help us un­der­stand that agri­cul­ture is as sexy as oth­er beats," said Ram­per­sad. En­tries must raise aware­ness of prac­tices which pro­mote agri­cul­ture and re­lat­ed is­sues: food se­cu­ri­ty and nu­tri­tion, sup­port sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, re­in­force mul­ti-sec­toral link­ages, en­cour­age rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, youth and women's de­vel­op­ment, en­gen­der en­vi­ron­ment land and wa­ter man­age­ment.

About en­tries:

?En­tries must have been pub­lished or broad­cast be­tween Oc­to­ber 6 and No­vem­ber 23, 2009, in recog­nised me­dia: con­ven­tion­al (print pub­li­ca­tions, tele­vi­sion or ra­dio) or recog­nised news me­dia sites and may take the form of news re­ports, spe­cial fea­tures, talk shows doc­u­men­taries, ed­i­to­ri­als, pic­to­ri­als, weblogs and oth­er on­line forms, docu­d­ra­mas, se­ri­als, or im­ages as pho­tographs, car­toons or draw­ings. Win­ners will be an­nounced at an awards cer­e­mo­ny in De­cem­ber 2009. De­tails of the com­pe­ti­tion, specifics re­gard­ing the var­i­ous cri­te­ria and en­try forms can be down­loaded from www.iica.int/trinidadand­to­ba­go, or www.car­di.org

For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion call 645-4555; 645-5020