CONTENTS

Glickman vs. Wileman - On the Doorstep of
The Supreme Court

USDA's Viewpoint

Editor's Notes

Director’s Corner

Next Meeting

Director's Corner

by Harry M. Kaiser

The Advisory and Steering Committees of NICPRE had their third annual meeting in Ithaca on September 12-13, 1996. The two committees, which are comprised of individuals from government, commodity promotion organizations, and academics, met to discuss a variety of topics, including developing research priorities and NICPRE activities for the next year. Here is a brief summary of three major recommendations from this meeting, we plan to implement in the upcoming year.

There was considerable agreement between the Steering and Advisory Committees that the economic impacts of branded vs. generic advertising should be a top research priority this year. This is a timely and important topic given the past decision in the Wileman and other ninth circuit (CA) challenges to mandatory checkoff programs, pending and future litigation. NICPRE did an econometric study of branded vs. generic fluid milk and the results of this study were presented at the NEC-63 conference in Monterey and published as a NICPRE Research Bulletin. Two other research projects sponsored by NICPRE deal with this topic.

A second recommendation of both Committees was the need for NICPRE to provide educational outreach to promotion organizations on how economic evaluations are conducted and the type of data needed for such evaluations. It was the opinion of the group that many commodity promotion groups do not understand the type of data nor the form the data needs to be in for economic evaluations. We are planning to do a feature NICPRE Quarterly article on this topic, which will be followed by sending all promotion groups on our mailing list a sample of data used in previous economic evaluations.

A third direction for future NICPRE research is the development of methods to evaluate programs other than advertising such as nutrition research, product development, nutrition education, and public relations. We are currently reviewing grant proposals for Fiscal Year 1997 and hope to select a project to consider one of these issues. Also, the focus of the spring 1997 NEC-63 conference will be on the estimation of returns to research.

Over the next year, look for NICPRE articles and activities that address these three important needs.

We have several personnel changes at NICPRE during the fall. Carlos Reberte resigned mid-September to become an econometrician for American Express, and John Lenz will be leaving at the end of November to do consulting activities. We wish John and Carlos all the best. To replace these two research associate positions, we have hired Chanjin Chung and Phil Vande Kamp from the University of Minnesota. Chanjin will start on November 1, 1996, and Phil is expected to start on January 1, 1997.