CONTENTS

Commodity Promotion Programs Win a Squeaker: Supreme Court Reverses 9th Circuit

Editor's Notes

Director’s Corner

Next Meeting

Director's Corner

by Harry M. Kaiser

The fourth annual meeting of NICPRE’s Advisory and Steering Committees was held in Ithaca on September 5-6, 1997. Although we have not yet learned about our funding status for fiscal year 1998, we devoted most of the meeting to discussing future research directions for NICPRE. We should hear shortly on funding status once Congress and the President approve the appropriations legislation. The following briefly summarizes some of the recommendations made by the two Committees.

Both Committees agreed that past and current NICPRE research has been well balanced, and the results have been communicated to many groups in the agricultural and food sectors. Both committees lauded NICPRE’s work last year on providing educational outreach to promotion organizations on how economic evaluations are conducted and what type of data is needed for such evaluations. One valuable suggestion for future efforts is to prepare educational materials more geared and “personalized” to the farmer-producer investor in commodity checkoff programs. We hope to follow through on this suggestion by collaborating with NEC-63 (the research committee on commodity promotion), which is currently putting together a notebook on commodity checkoff evaluation.

Another important development of the meeting was the recommendation that NICPRE leverage its funds for sponsored research by matching funds with commodity organizations. Last year, NICPRE received 20 excellent research proposals, but could only fund five of them. One way to increase the amount of research, and provide commodity promotion organizations with a subsidized way of having evaluation studies completed, is for NICPRE to match dollars with a specific commodity organization to have an economic study completed. We will experiment with various matching relationships this year.

Over the next year, look for NICPRE to put these and other Committee-generated strategies into action. As always, I welcome your thoughts on ways to improve our organization.