Rural radio to help tackle food security

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has teamed up with a global network of community radio stations, including Olkonerei FM in Tanzania, in an effort to improve rural food security and health, the UN agency stated in a press release on Tuesday.

FAO has teamed up with two NGOs specialising in community radio -the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) and the Developing Countries' Farm Radio Network (DCFRN) - to devise practical and focused training programmes for community radio broadcasters working to improve the lives and livelihoods of their listeners.

The organisations also intend to set up a food security news agency with correspondents from AMARC's member radio stations, initially in Africa, but later across the world. The service will disseminate information provided by FAO and tailored specifically for radio production, according to the UN agency - see http://www.fao.org

"We must bring food security information to the grassroots, to the people who need it," says Martin Sanaingo'o Kariongi ole Sanago, a broadcaster from Olkonerei FM, in Simanjiro District (4.00 S 36.30 E) , Arusha Region, northeastern Tanzania.

The stations involved in the rural radio project are typically located in regions where unequal access to land and resources are at the heart of food insecurity, says AMARC's Africa Director, Michelle Ntab.

Olkonerei FM in Simanjiro is located in the Maasai Steppe of Tanzania, where some 85 percent of inhabitants are Maasai pastoralists, whose livelihood is cattle raising. The area is semiarid, and the Maasai move from place to place in order to find proper grazing for their cattle in different seasons of the year.

Increasing population pressure is putting pressure on natural resources in this area, as in much of northern Tanzania, according to humanitarian sources. Land resources are under increasing pressure from expansion of agricultural activities, livestock grazing, wild fires, charcoal burning and general over-exploitation of wood resources. Human poverty is an underlying cause of many of these problems.

Sanago and his colleagues in the project - from radio stations in Niger, Mali and South Africa - come from very different regions, but face common obstacles and share a common goal: to help people attain food security so they can move beyond subsistence to a better life, according to the FAO.

"We want to help our people improve their lives, and you need a full belly to do that," says Dramane Bagayoko, from Mali's Radio Djamena Foko.

"Community radio is Africa's Internet. It reaches our most important audience: the illiterate and hungry," said Jean-Pierre Ilboudo of the FAO's Extension, Education and Communication Service.

Sanago does not have a computer or even a phone at Olkonerei FM; he drives 100 km to Arusha to log on to the Internet, but cannot afford to surf it to help him with his radio programming.

The limitations of the Internet - especially in Africa, where technology, access, cost and people's educational levels severely limit its use - have forced people to recognise the advantages of radio, according to DCFRN.

"People are going back to radio, but there has been very little invested in the broadcasters themselves," says Nancy Bennett of the farm radio network, and training is therefore a key part of the strategic plan for the rural radio project.

As for content, AMARC usually works on civil rights issues, but has come to regard food security as equally important, according to the FAO.

"We are talking about the right of the population to be informed and to be heard about food security," says Ntab. "It is a right that FAO members need to support - not just with words, but with legislation and money."

The need for programme- and policy-makers to tune in to the needs of the poor and hungry is emphasised by Jean-Pierre Ilboudo. "What we need to do is to listen to the people who produce the food," he says. "And then we can produce information that they will want to listen to."

And people in Maasailand do listen to Olkonerei FM, according to Sanago, who says the station fills an important role in bridging the gap between the traditional pastoralist and a settled, cash economy.

"Radio is part of both worlds," he says. "Unless it is shared by both, it simply talks to itself."

Community radio also needs to solve problems, Sanago adds. "When peoples' cows are sick they need to know how to cure them... If the radio doesn't tell them that, they won't listen."

Most rural radios get information from government sources and NGOs, but they do not know how to combine what the community is saying with the official information, according to Ilboudo.

"We want to teach them how to turn a factsheet into a radio script. Africa is so steeped in oral culture that the only limit is peoples' creativity - and there is plenty of that."