THE BusinessMirror won three prizes—two of them in major categories—in the 13th Bright Leaf Agriculture Journalism Awards.

The BusinessMirror bagged major awards for Tobacco Story of the Year and Tobacco Photo of the Year in this year’s run of the Bright Leaf awarding which was held on Friday (November 15) in Makati City.

It also took home the Best Agriculture Feature Story-National, providing the news outlet its eighth award in a span of one month.

The newspaper’s special report “Tax thrust threatens tobacco tillers’ take,” authored by Jasper Emmanuel Y. Arcalas and Elijah Felice E. Rosales, was awarded Tobacco Story of the Year.

The story, published in the BusinessMirror’s Broader Look page in August, tackled the plight of tobacco farmers, as well as their future, in the face of higher cigarette taxes to be applied next year. Arcalas and Rosales traveled to Candon City, Ilocos Sur—the country’s tobacco capital—to gather insights on the ground on the prospect of the tobacco planting sector.

BusinessMirror correspondent Laila Austria sealed her second Tobacco Photo of the Year with her capture titled “Golden Leaves.”

Another Broader Look story, titled “Women of Bacoor’s embattled mussel industry struggle for survival” penned by Jonathan Mayuga, was named Best Agriculture Feature Story-National. It narrated the lives of five women working in different areas of the mussels trade, as their source of income is faced with different man-made and natural challenges.

In a stretch of three years, the BusinessMirror obtained eight accolades from the Bright Leaf, of which five were secured by Arcalas, the newspaper’s Agriculture and Commodities reporter.

The awards were also the BusinessMirror’s sixth, seventh and eighth in a span of one month. The Makati-based newspaper in October was awarded Business News Source of the Year for the second consecutive year by the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines (Ejap) after its coverage on agriculture and mining, banking, telecommunications and transportation, and trade and industry were recognized.

The BusinessMirror’s Agriculture and Commodities page, edited by Jennifer Ng, comes out on weekdays, while the Broader Look page, edited by Dennis Estopace, is printed every Thursday.

Launched in 2007, the Bright Leaf Agriculture Journalism Awards is a yearly award-giving body that celebrates the country’s most outstanding and relevant stories in print, radio and TV. It also honors photos that capture the essence of tobacco planting and the agriculture sector.