CONTENTS

An Economic Evaluation of Generic Egg Advertising by the American Egg Board

Director’s Column

Next Meeting

Special Cash Opportunity

NEC-63 2002 Next Meeting March 21-22, 2002 Albuquerque, New Mexico Allocation Issues in Check-off Programs

Director's Column

by Harry M. Kaiser

Under the 1996 Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act, all federal marketing orders operating promotion programs are required to have an economic evaluation conducted to ascertain the extent of their impact on the market. To date, most federal marketing orders have had the required economic evaluations performed. This requirement of the last Farm Bill has resulted in a lot of good economic research by economists throughout the United States on the market effects of generic marketing activities conducted by checkoff programs.

While some of this research has been published in various outlets such as university staff papers, NICPRE bulletins and Quarterly articles, academic journal articles, and trade publications, many of you may have only seen some of these findings. I have encouraged authors of these studies to write NICPRE Quarterly articles on their findings in order to more widely disseminate interesting research results to the entire checkoff program audience. The result has been a series of evaluation articles reported in the Quarterly over the past several years, similar to the featured article in this issue. Still, not all of the research has been widely reported and distributed to interested parties. As a result, over the next year, with the leadership of Professor Henry Kinnucan at Auburn University, NICPRE will be conducting a thorough review and analysis of what we have learned since 1996 based on the economic studies resulting from the 1996 Farm Bill mandate. We expect to have a NICPRE Bulletin and Quarterly article that summarizes our finding published sometime in late 2002. We feel that this project will be extremely valuable to industry leaders and academics alike.