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Social, Environment and Food Safeguards
Email: murrummuddah1@bigpond.com
Lorraine Follett has academic and professional interests that straddle the social and physical sciences. She undertook a double major of Rural Sociology and Environmental Studies with Biology and Philosophy as electives in her first degree at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University and almost 20 years later, studied for a M App Sc in Agriculture and Rural Development at the University of Western Sydney, specialising in agricultural and environmental systems in the development context.
In between she became a graded senior journalist and completed a Diploma in Communication, Art and Photography and a Graduate Diploma in Natural Resource Management. She has also a number of practical agricultural and NRM related certificates.
She has a strong personal and professional interest in agriculture and food production. Apart from a continuous involvement in farming almost from the day she was born, she has worked with some of Australia's senior agricultural bodies, both government and industry. After deciding there had to be more in life than journalism, she commenced work with the Forestry Division of the Victorian (state) Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands working with the division on harvesting and disease outbreak controls, and later with the Natural Resource Management Division in a program established as an emergency to solve serious saline, sodic soil and high ground water issues that were reducing Australia's food bowl in the Murray-Goulburn catchment region, to waste, with farming families walking off their dairies, orchards and market garden farms.
With this state department, and later at Australian Government and regional levels she has also had a close relationship with Australia's Landcare Program, and was asked by AusAID to undertake a feasibility study of the value of Landcare as a social, environmental and agricultural development program for South Africa in the late 1990s. After the initial feasibility study, she had two further inputs into the development of Landcare in South Africa.
In the early 1990s she was director of communications and the first director for social policy for Australia's largest farming representative body, the Victorian Farmers” Federation and undertook similar work on contract for the New South Wales Farmers' Association over a period of time.
She also held the position of Senior Policy Analyst with Australian Pork Ltd, Australia's premier pork production organisation. In this role she concentrated on animal welfare and health, environment, trade and international conventions, including labelling.
Since the mid 1990s, she has undertaken international consultancies covering the socio-environmental and agricultural sectors and has also worked with the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) and the Department of Environment on contracts ranging from International Heritage sites to biosecurity, animal welfare and health and natural resource management.
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Eritrean woman making traditional Injera bread from the iron-rich teff grain
which is now becoming a rare and expensive crop, village near Keren, Eritrea.
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Her most recent work has been undertaken in Papua New Guinea where in 2011 she worked on a social and gender safeguards TA for rural bridge replacement and successfully investigated the possibility of relocating some of the old bridges to remote areas to provide access to produce markets and health and education facilities. In 2012 the Australian Government Department of Environment sent her to Papua New Guinea to work on a joint government program associated with the heritage listed Kokoda Track. This work covered international heritage, ecotourism, institutional development and a range of social and environmental issues.
Her multidisciplinary background, combined with her practical natural resource management and farming experience (dairy, beef, fine wool and meat sheep and cashmere goats) has led her on a pathway of rich and varied work, from finding solutions for Swaziland rural village children orphaned by HIV/Aids and who had no knowledge of basic subsistence food production, and were starving and feral, to advising government departments on policy and protocols and preparing strategic plans.
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| Villager laying out 'mustard' at a produce market, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea |
When not working in the field, she lives in a rural area of southern Australia where she pursues her farming interests which include breeding superfine merino wool in both white and a wide variety of natural colours and having this wool produced into yarns and other wool products which she frequently uses in one of her other interests – textiles – as a weaver and felter. Other interests include agricultural anthropology, music and art.
