The Western Producer is at work in Moldova.
Yes, that Moldova. The former Soviet state located east of Romania and west of Ukraine.
Patricia Orlowitz is an American journalist who has been working in Moldova since 1997. She assists with a privatization project that has helped about one million Moldovans from collective farms receive their own land and equipment and start private farms.
Orlowitz first contacted the Producer by e-mail back in June, noting she had found our website useful in teaching Moldovan journalists how agriculture can be covered.
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We’ve been in touch a few times since to get more information on her project. Orlowitz says at least 60 percent of the Moldovan economy is agriculture based, and 60 to 70 percent of the 4.7 million population is rural, but there is little agricultural news reporting available.
She works for the Private Farmers Assistance program, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, Soros Foundation-Moldova and East-West Management Institute. That group designated money to the Center for Independent Journalism to fund an internship program for 14 university students.
Part of the students’ work involved writing stories about Moldovan farmers for news wire services and the independent press. Orlowitz was guest speaker at a training course. That’s when she used The Western Producer.
“All the headlines of the articles were shared with students to show the diversity of topics that arise out of one question: what is the state of agriculture,” wrote Orlowitz.
“I think the students were overwhelmed. They had never thought about agriculture as a subject worth covering. … Hopefully Western Producer’s coverage – its depth, its approach and its ability to tell the ag story to non-ag readers – will provide the impetus for them to see what they could do.”
Orlowitz said she is hopeful that funding this fall will allow more journalists to increase their concentration on agricultural reporting.
For our part, it’s nice to hear the Producer may be contributing to greater agricultural awareness in other countries. We plan to keep checking in with Orlowitz to see how things are going. Next time we talk, maybe we’ll ask about comparative commodity prices.
