Marc F. Bellemare Posts

(Note: This post has a lot of inside baseball about the agricultural and applied economics profession. If you tend to read this blog for the econometrics post, it is safe to skip this post and wait for the next installment of ‘Metrics Monday, which will hopefully be posted next week.)

After my last post, in which I announced that I was running for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s (AAEA) Board of Directors, a colleague sent me the following on Twitter, via direct message:

I was interested also to hear your thoughts on all of the gender issues that have been swirling in the economics field and how you think they are similar/contrast with what we have in AAEA world. You didn’t bring these challenges to the field up at all in your blog post. Do you know if these trends are similar/different? Given how big an issue this has been over the last year, I think it would be good for people to hear your thoughts on it as a potential member of the AAEA board.

Well, the secret is now out. I am running for the Board of Directors of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

If you are a member, I would like to (i) encourage you to exercise your right to vote by clicking here to access your ballot, and (ii) solicit your vote, as I think the AAEA needs to hear from the younger generation.

If you wonder why you should vote for me, my answers to candidate questions are below, as is my bio-sketch.

Questions and Answers

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing AAEA?

Given the stability of our membership at around 2,500 members these past few years, I see communications and outreach as both our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity. Perception is reality; this mean that our communication strategy feeds into the perceived policy relevance of the excellent work done by agricultural and applied economists. As a profession, we are at the forefront of some of the most important issues of our time, yet our work cannot seem to get the attention it deserves from the press, the public and, ultimately, policy makers. Having spent the first half of my career outside of the land-grant system, I have realized that our scholarship also does not always get the recognition we deserve from members of the economics profession.

I see these two problems as intertwined, but also as solvable with an effective communication and outreach strategy.

What actions would you initiate to address the challenges and opportunities described in your response to the previous question?

As a member of the AAEA’s communication committee, I have witnessed the association’s communications and outreach strategy closely for a few years now. I would begin by reviewing the communications strategy to focus on bringing national and international media attention to the high-quality, highly policy-relevant work done by AAEA members. A handful of our members have managed to get their work that kind of recognition entirely based upon their own efforts. There is no reason why we cannot collectively bring our members’ best work the same kind of attention.

Regarding recognition from the economics profession, I would work toward (i) having more dedicated AAEA sessions at the January meetings, and (ii) instigating a formal conversation between the USDA and the leadership of the National Bureau of Economic Research so the latter recognizes agricultural and food economics as a distinct program with its own set activities.

At the end of your three-year term, what changes/new initiatives would you have helped create?

Consistent with my response to the previous questions, at the end of my three-year term, I first want to come up with a communications strategy that will generate consistent attention for our members’ best work from the national and international media, whether this means newspapers, television, radio, or newer media. Second, I want to argue for more AAEA sessions at the January meetings. Finally, instead of one-off conferences on agriculture-related topic, I want to see a distinct NBER program on agricultural and food economics—there is no reason why they should have programs on aging or children, but nothing on agriculture or food.

There is just too much good work being done by agricultural and applied economists for our light to be hidden under a bushel.

Bio-Sketch

Marc F. Bellemare is Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he also directs the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy.

His research lies at the intersection of agricultural economics, food policy, and international development. For his research, he has won the AAEA’s 2007 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, the AAEA’s 2011 Outstanding AJAE Article award, and the AAEA’s 2014 Quality of Research Discovery awards. That same year, he also won the European Association of Agricultural Economists’ Quality of Research Discovery Award for the same article.

Marc currently serves as one of two co-editors of Food Policy. In the past, he has served as associate editor of the AJAE and on several AAEA committees.

His work has so far been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, National Public Radio, and the Wall Street Journal.

In late 2013, some colleagues and I applied for funding from the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute. Because of the name of the institute, we thought “People think of local and organic foods as healthy foods, and they think of an illness-free life as a healthy life, so why not look at the relationship between local and organic foods and food safety?”

So we submitted a proposal, and it got funded. It was a pretty small amount of money, as far as these things go–less then $5,000–and our research team eventually split along disciplinary fault lines. But because I could not look at the relationship between local and organic foods on one hand and food safety on the other hand in a way that was methodologically satisfactory to me, I chose to look instead at the relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness.

Four years (and a New York Times op-ed) later, I am happy to note that my article titled “Farmers Markets and Food-Borne Illness,” coauthored with my former Master’s student Jenny Nguyen, is now published (gated; please email me for a copy) in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.