Our Nextgen Podcast Series Episode 4: Pathways to Making a Global Difference in Ag

May 28, 2021

Maree Bouterakos has worked in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Italy and has just returned from Laos, with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme.

We hope you are enjoying our new podcast series on the many and varied career pathways to ag for development. To date, we have heard from young anthropologist Kayla Lochner, environmental scientist Anneliese Austin; and communication specialist Zoie Jones about their work and life journeys.

For our fourth podcast, we hear from Maree Bouterakos, whose blog is here. Maree has had a ‘nutrition pathway to ag research for development’ and she has just returned from Laos where she was the Head of Nutrition for the United Nations World Food Programme providing advice on ways to achieve food and nutrition security so that the poor can afford a nutritious diet.

This podcast initiative is proudly brought to you as part of a suite of activities underway through our ACIAR-supported NextGen project.

Our career pathways to ag for development focus features videos, blogs and podcasts of people who have had a road to ag for development that doesn’t initially involve agriculture – for example through anthropology, science, social sciences, finance, communication, law, environmental sciences, health and nutrition, economics and business.

We know that working in ag for development has amazing global, national, professional and very personal impacts. And that you don’t necessarily have to have an ag background to find yourself working in a field in a developing country, helping farmers to better feed their families and earn an income from their small plots of land.

For the young people you’re going to meet in our podcast series, intelligence, passion, resilience, ingenuity and luck made working in ag for development a reality – even though none of them started out studying agriculture.

We’ll hear that there is a broad range of pathways to rewarding and exciting careers in international agriculture, not necessarily limited to agriculture.

We hope you enjoy this series, which is brought to you with GenerationAg. We would definitely like to hear from others who have made it to ag for development without a background or studies in agriculture – email [email protected]