Coverage of organic agricultural news in nigerian newspapers: Implications for the promotion of ecological organic agriculture (EOA) and food risk reduction

Summary

Organic agriculture is the alternative practice to conventional agriculture. It provides a better, safe and healthy alternative farming systems.However, the accurate knowledge of organic agriculture as a profitable alternative practice to conventional agriculture is still inadequate. Therefore, there is need to get the farmers and the consumers informed about the benefits of organic agriculture. It is on this basis that this study aim to examine the extent to which the Nigerian newspapers cover information on organic agriculture.This study was basically on coverage and content analysis of organic agricultural news in three selected Nigerian Newspapers that have been in continuous production: The Nigerian Tribune, Guardian, and Punch Newspapers. They are among the most widely read thereby having a wider coverage in Nigeria. The study covered the period of January 2010 – July 2012.
Result showed that Tribune (61.9%)has the highest number of reportage while Punch (14.3%) has the least reportage. It also revealed that the three selected newspapers reported more general issues (66.7%) than the other content categories which are food safety news (19%), economic concentration news (9.5%), and environmental news (4.8%).Tribune allotted more space to organic agricultural news with 76.8% than Guardian 15.2% and Punch 8.1%.This shows that the space allotted to organic agricultural news is not encouraging, they are not reported routinely. The study revealed that there is no significant difference in the types of news of coverage onOrganic agricultural articles in the three selected Nigerian daily newspapers
(F-value =0.227, p-value is=0.799), this impliess that the three selected Nigerian daily newspapers cover issues on food safety, environment, economic concentration and general issues news in the same way.The study concluded that coverage of organic agriculture is still very low and this affects the level of awareness as well as the involvement of people in the practice and the development. Thus, the study recommends that Nigeria press should be sensitive to issues on organic agriculture, that is, give adequate attention to it and publicize it on news print.