Australian interest in Food Security

The Crawford Fund in Australia supports a lot of good work on agricultural biodiversity and more sustainable agriculture, but its website is a bugger. No RSS feed. And sometimes no way to link to an interesting story. Or at least, none that I can see. Nothing for it but a spot of copy and paste.

There has been a renewed focus on food security in the media of late with a range of national and metropolitan papers focusing on the topic. And the most recent AusAID “Focus” magazine is themed on food and food security, with an article by The Crawford Fund focusing on the rewards of research. Following a Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visit to Vietnam, ABC TV Landline producer Kerry Straight has been working on a special feature for the program on food security, which Crawford Fund, ACIAR and CSIRO has been assisting with through this year. The feature has now gone to air focusing on a broad range of issues related to food security from both the developing country and Australian perspectives. The feature includes a range of speakers who were part of the Crawford Fund’s State Parliamentary Conference in Brisbane in April this year. In late June, the 35min feature went to air on Landline on “The Future of Food” including Kanayo Nwanze, Julian Cribb, Rick Roush, Michael D’Occhio, Peter Carberry and others. The story can be found here. The feature provides a good overview of the complexity of the food security issue, stressing the importance of R&D. Visits to East Africa and to Aceh are currently being supported as the next Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visits.

I love the idea of “seeing is believing” tours.