ERuDeF Staff Wins TVE Green Competition 2013

Limbi Blessing Tata, a Botanist working for ERuDeF, has won the 2013 Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) award. Limbi’s locally produced film “Bring Back Ibo Coco” highlights the negative effects of chemical fertilizers, bush burning, and the use of other chemicals on the soil. It goes ahead to attribute the disappearance of Colocasia esculenta (locally called Ibo coco) from the South West Cameroon due to environmental degradation.

Bring Back Ibo Coco, a one-minute melo-documentary drama acted in Pidgin with English sub-titling was produced by a team of young talents “with a concern for the future of our planet.” It was entered into the Biodiversity International Award for Agriculture and Forest Biodiversity category.

The documentary competed with an Irish film Bee Friendly. At the end of voting on December 19, 2013, Bring Back Ibo Coco emerged victorious with a total of 2.600 views on YouTube  against 1.600 views for its Irish (UK) rival. Other winners came from Bolivia, Colombia, Mauritius, Nepal, Peru and Slovakia.

Bring Back Ibo Coco was conceived and presented by Limbi, a botanist of the pioneer batch of the Institute of Biodiversity and Non-profit Studies IBiNS, Buea, and produced and directed by John Bunyui Njabi, a teacher, musician and environmental crusader at G.B.H.S. Muea, Buea.

The TVE biomovies 2013 competition in its fourth successful edition invited aspiring and established film makers worldwide to submit film proposals in either Arabic, French, Russian, Spanish or English.

On Friday, October 25, 2013, after a record 565 film proposals from 75 countries that entered the competition, 14 finalists’ films were selected to go into production and to go live on YouTube for a two-month voting period to find the ultimate winners. Finalists came, from Bolivia, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Peru, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, the US and the UK. It was up to the global public to choose the winning films. With every view on YouTube notching up one vote, the winners were to be the most watched films on the tvebiomovies website: with one victor to be chosen in each of the seven categories.

UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, screened all 14 films on November 11, 2013 at the last UN Climate Conference (COP 19) in Warsaw, Poland.