Lorencita Pinto
World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters
(AMARC), Montreal, Canada
AMARC intends to unveil a news agency for Africa and by Africa, which will be targeted at the community radio network covering the whole of African continent. This service will disseminate information in local languages, as well as giving daily news and weekly summary services (mainly textual). It will also have thematic services of texts and audio on pertinent issues such as food security, human rights and democracy, election monitoring, HIV/AIDS, and environment.
Food Security Information and Early Warning Service
The food security information and early warning service will be created following the collabouration between AMARC and FAO, as FAO will provide the technical contents while AMARC makes available its network of community radios. It will cover the whole of African continent.
It is foreseen that the service will benefit various categories of clients such as radio stations who are AMARC partners, community, commercial and state radios and media, NGOs and other organizations of civil society, as well as individuals. It will also be useful to governments as a reference aid to decision-making and planning.
The service will derive its information from the FAO headquarters in Rome and FAO representations in the concerned member-countries. Another source of information will be from grass-root level through local correspondents working in the field among farmers and populations.
The service will be an on-line operation, which employs electronic mail and Internet. This will be supplemented by the traditional media services, such as fax, mail, audiocassettes, CDs, publications, etc.
In this pursuit, the food security information and early warning service will utilise two sources of human resources. The first will be a group of journalists based at the AMARC regional offices in South Africa. The second will be the correspondents from community radio stations who belong to AMARC network.
They should have the technical skills to communicate on food security, as well as the journalistic capability to collect the information, to analyse it and to disseminate it. Therefore, training will be essential, so a number of training sessions is envisioned. This will entail the training of trainers, who will in turn train other rural radio broadcasters. The service will also have her journalist trained at FAO headquarters in Rome. There will be training and production sessions as well, on the central issue of food security (intermediary contents) and on journalism (collection, processing and dissemination of specific information). The third level of training will be the development of training curricular and specific educational tools.
The service on food security and early warning will have as its contents, both information and warning sections. The information section will be determined on the basis of a preliminary survey on the information and communication needs of the community radio stations and populations. The general approach of the early warning section will be determined by local and regional needs, in close cooperation with the FAO technical services such as the GIEWS.
The approach of this service on food security information and early warning will be based on the FAO’s definition of food security: “Food security exists when all human beings have, at all times, physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and their food preferences, so that they may lead a healthy and active life.” This involves four elements: availability, stability, accessibility, and nutritional sufficiency.
A fifth important element is added - that of communication. Here, it is communication for improving training in matters of nutrition, health and production of food nutrients, communication for increasing agricultural production, and lastly; for mobilizing the population to protect the environment. This communication is also meant to strengthen collabouration between farmers and extension workers as well as between policy-makers and planners. It is a communication that promotes the participation of men and women, as well as local and global resources and technologies.
