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Los Baños, Philippines
September 5, 2003
Rice Today, the award-winning biannual
magazine of the International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI), has just become easier for
readers to sample on the World Wide Web. This and other
developments in coming months promise to raise the profile of
the only international magazine dedicated to the world's most
important food crop.
Since its launch in April 2002, replacing
IRRI's annual report, Rice Today has been accessible through the
IRRI home page ( www.irri.org)
in the form of one pdf file per issue. Now Web surfers have
direct access through IRRI home to archives of the magazine's
three regular columns:
- Grain of Truth, in which rice
scientists' guest contributions tell it like it is;
- Rice Facts, in which agricultural
economist David Dawe takes a fresh look at the numbers; and
- Donors Corner, containing brief
profiles of IRRI's valued funding partners.
The site also has a Feature Presentation
link to a selected article, which will be replaced every week.
The first Feature Presentation is a 6-page spread entitled Lost
Horizon Restored, about the innovative research techniques
that rice scientists are employing to help farmers in
mountainous tribal areas of northern Vietnam improve the
sustainability of their agricultural practices. The article won
the 2003 Gold Award in the category writing for magazines from
the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture,
Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences (ACE).
IRRI home continues to provide links, as
in the past, to a PDF of each issue in its entirety, with direct
links to individual stories from the Table of Contents.
Meanwhile, the United Nations' declaration
of the International Year of Rice 2004 is providing impetus for
further developing the potential of Rice Today. In 2004, IRRI
will produce four special International Year of Rice
issues of the magazine, which will appear in mid-January and the
beginning of April, July and October. With more frequent
publication, IRRI will actively seek advertisers and other
partners to help defray production costs and broaden the
publication's market and impact. To this end, the institute is
surveying the magazine's existing readership to find out who
they are and what they want.
Readers are urged to participate by
completing and returning survey postcards inserted into the
upcoming October 2003 issue (Vol. 2, No. 2) or by logging on to
www.irri.org/ricetoday/readerssurvey.asp
after 1 October 2003.
Those who do not yet receive Rice Today in
the mail, but would like to, should notify the editor, Peter
Fredenburg, by email
p.fredenburg@cgiar.org, phone (+63-2) 845-0563 ext 2411.
The International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) is the world's leading rice research and
training center. Based in the Philippines and with offices in 10
other Asian countries, it is an autonomous, nonprofit
institution focused on improving the well-being of present and
future generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly
those with low incomes, while preserving natural resources. IRRI
is one of 16 centers funded through the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association of
public and private donor agencies. Please visit the Web sites of
the CGIAR (www.cgiar.org)
or Future Harvest Foundation (www.futureharvest.org),
a nonprofit organization that builds awareness and supports food
and environmental research. |
