CONTENTS

The California Prune Board's Promotion Program

Editor's Notes

An Economic Evaluation of California Avocado Industry Marketing Programs, 1961-1995

Manager's Viewpoint

Director’s Corner

Next Meeting

Director's Corner

by Harry M. Kaiser

The Advisory and Steering Committees of NICPRE recently met in Chicago to discuss current and future research and strategic directions. John Huston and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association graciously hosted the meeting. The meeting was quite productive, raising a lot of issues and strategies for NICPRE, which is going into its fifth year of existence. Since it is difficult to summarize the entire meeting, I would like to devote this issue’s Director’s Corner to several interesting issues that were discussed at the Chicago meeting.

The consensus of the two committees was that NICPRE is on the right track, but some improvements could be made, e.g., NICPRE could devote a little more attention to practical as opposed to academic research. The group commended NICPRE on leveraging some of its research dollars this year with the Washington Apple Commission, and strongly recommended more aggressively approaching checkoff groups to do the same this year. The group also acknowledged that NICPRE played a very useful role in the legal challenges to checkoff programs during the past couple of years, primarily through providing economic impact assessment and through coordinating educational opportunities and updates on the legal issues. There was also some discussion on the notion that economists need to evaluate programs in their entirety rather than focusing solely on single activities, e.g., advertising. Still, the group was upbeat about NICPRE’s past and present contributions to commodity promotion organizations and government policy makers.

One area that the group devoted a lot of attention to was leveraging NICPRE’s funds for subcontract research by economists at other land grant universities. NICPRE has in the past subcontracted a little over 35 percent of its total budget to researchers at other universities. One recommendation was for NICPRE to give strong preference to potential subcontractees who receive partial support for their research from other organizations, e.g., commodity promotion groups. We will state this explicitly in this year’s request for proposals. In addition, NICPRE will contact all of the federal groups to elicit potential financial support for any research projects that would be of interest to the commodity groups. Many organizations will need economic evaluations done as required y the Farm Bill, and the offer by NICPRE to sharethat this two-pronged leveraging approach (i.e., giving preference to researchers receiving partial funding elsewhere, and approaching commodity promotion groups for partial funding) is an excellent leveraging strategy for NICPRE to attempt this year. I will be contacting some of you in the near future to discuss this possibility.

There was also some discussion about the current format of the NICPRE Quarterly. A couple people argued it should be reformatted to make it less dense, and the articles shorter. However, other people argued that it is good the way it currently is formatted. As a result, I have decided to send out a short survey with a future issue to get reader reactions to the current format. When you do receive this survey, I hope that you will take the time to complete it so we can make any improvements that may be deemed necessary. Also, we will be adding another written outreach tool over the next year which will be a one page fax to be sent out every two months that briefly summarizes NICPRE activities. This will serve as a supplement rather than a substitute for the NICPRE Quarterly.