Speaker biographies

Series Authors:

Julian M. Alston is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics of the University of California, Davis. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in microeconomic theory and the analysis of agricultural markets and policies. Prior to beginning his current position in 1988, Alston was the chief economist in the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in Victoria, Australia. His experience in public policy analysis and advice, and administration of a large scientific organization, shaped Alston’s research interests in the economic analysis of agricultural markets and public policies concerning agricultural incomes, prices, trade, and agricultural research and promotion.

John M. Antle is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University. He has been an assistant and associate professor at the University of California at Davis, and a Gilbert White Fellow and University Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. During 1989–90 he served as a senior staff economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, D.C. He served as a member of the National Research Council’s (NRC) Board on Agriculture (1991–97), and as a member of the NRC’s Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (1998–99). He was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports published in 2001 and 2007. He was president of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA) from 1999–2000, and received the AAEA outstanding journal article award (1988) and distinguished fellow award (2001). His current research focuses on the sustainability of agricultural systems in industrialized and developing countries, terrestrial and geologic greenhouse gas mitigation, impacts of climate change in agriculture, and payments for ecosystem services in agriculture.

Bruce A. Babcock is a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. Professor Babcock’s research interests are in agricultural commodity policy in a global context, development of innovative risk management strategies for farmers, and the impact of biofuels on U.S. and world agriculture. He is regularly called upon to advise government, commodity groups, and industry on the impacts of alternative agricultural policies.

Joseph V. Balagtas is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. He does economic research on the regulation and organization of agricultural markets. He has published work on a range of issues related to dairy markets, including empirical studies of milk marketing orders, the dairy check-off, and the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. He is currently studying production and marketing in the organic dairy sector and the dynamics of commodity prices.

Christopher B. Barrett is International Professor of Applied Economics and Management and co-director of the African Food Security and Natural Resources Management program at Cornell University. He was a staff economist with the Institute for International Finance in the 1980s. Professor Barrett’s research focuses on issues of economic development, poverty, hunger, environmental stress, and individual behavior under risk and uncertainty. He has been principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on extramural research grants totaling more than $16 million from the National Science Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and other sponsors. He serves as editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and as an associate editor or editorial board member of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Environment and Development Economics, the Journal of African Economies, and World Development. He was previously president of the Association of Christian Economists.

John C. Beghin is Marlin Cole Professor of International Agricultural Economics at Iowa State University, where he is also the director of the university’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. Beghin is a leading scholar on agricultural trade policy modeling and analysis. He previously held positions at North Carolina State University, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Centre, Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, and the International Labor Office. He has consulted for various international and governmental agencies including the OECD, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the World Bank.

Gary Brester is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University. He was an assistant and associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University from 1990–97. His teaching responsibilities currently include farm and ranch management, agribusiness management, and managerial economics. Brester’s applied research program includes livestock and grain, risk management, international trade, agribusiness, and farm management issues. He is currently president of the Western Agricultural Economics Association.

Jon Doggett is vice president for public policy at the National Corn Growers Association. In this capacity, he oversees the operation of the Washington, D.C., office of the Corn Growers and serves as chief lobbyist for the organization. In 2003, he was named one of Washington’s most influential lobbyists by the Hill newspaper. He was previously district manager for Montana and Wyoming for the Allis Chambers Corporation and a stockbroker for Dean Witter Reynolds. In 1988, Doggett became senior legislative assistant for Rep. Ron Marlenee (R-Mont.), a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee.  In 1991, he joined the American Farm Bureau Federation Washington staff as assistant director of governmental relations. He was senior director of Congressional relations when he left the Farm Bureau in 2002. 

Joseph Glauber currently serves as special Doha agricultural envoy at the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. He is on detail from the Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he has served as deputy chief economist since 1992. In addition to his work in the Doha negotiations, he served as economic adviser at the so-called Blair House agreements leading to the completion of the Uruguay round negotiations. He is the author of numerous studies on crop insurance, disaster policy, and U.S. farm policy. Prior to his current position, he served as senior staff economist for agriculture, natural resources, and trade at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and as an economist at the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Bruce L. Gardner is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been since 1981. He was previously on the faculties of Texas A&M University (1977–80) and North Carolina State University (1968–75). He also served as assistant secretary of agriculture for economics during the George H. W. Bush administration from 1989 to 1991, and as senior staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1975 to 1977 under Presidents Ford and Carter. Gardner’s research and writings have received several national awards from the American Agricultural Economics Association. He was named a fellow of the association in 1989 and was its elected president in 2000–01. He has been active in agricultural policy at the state, national, and international levels, and has testified many times before U.S. Senate and House committees on agricultural issues.

Ralph E. Heimlich is the principal and owner of Agricultural Conservation Economics, a consulting firm providing expertise in agricultural conservation policy topics. He has researched and published a wide range of environmental topics over the last thirty years, including developing the definition of highly erodible cropland used in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs; investigating sodbusting, agricultural wetland conversion, and urbanization of farmland; estimating amounts and control of sediment and nutrient pollution from fertilizers and manure contributing to hypoxia in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico; and advancing the economics of precision agriculture methods. He has participated in and led interagency river basin and research studies involving USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, state agencies, and the National Academy of Sciences. He retired as a deputy director from USDA’s Economic Research Service in 2003 and worked in EPA’s Office of Policy, Planning, and Evaluation Agricultural Branch, and with Gladstone Associates.

Maureen Kilkenny is a professor specializing in economic geography, rural development, and community finance in the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno. For her research on rural development, the North American Regional Science Council named her the Outstanding Junior Scholar of 2000. She has directed doctoral candidates at the Sorbonne, and been a visiting scholar at the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research, Scotland; the Centre for Operations Research and Econometrics in Belgium; the Université de Toulouse, France; and the National Bureau of Economic Research Applied General Equilibrium Group. She gave the keynote addresses at the 2005 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development workshop on rural development and agricultural policy and at the 2004 meeting of the British Agricultural Economics Society.

Barrett Kirwan is an assistant professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at the University of Maryland. His primary field of research is U.S. agricultural policy, with a focus on the effects of U.S. agricultural subsidies. Professor Kirwan’s research ranges from investigating the effects of agricultural subsidies on farmland rental markets to determining the influence of U.S. subsidies on income and inequality in developing countries. His work has been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Nicolai V. Kuminoff is an assistant professor in the department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech. He was a staff research associate at the University of California Agricultural Issues Center, where he wrote books, articles, and other publications on agriculture and policy. His research focuses on determining what people are willing to pay for non-market goods, including environmental amenities produced as a byproduct of farming operations.

Stanley R. Johnson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University, currently serving as special assistant to the dean of the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association. An econometrician and internationally renowned expert on agricultural policy, he has published hundreds of articles and books. He was director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University (1985–96) as well as of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute.

Tim Josling is a professor in the Food Research Institute at Stanford University. He previously taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Reading, England. Mr. Josling’s research interests center on industrial country agricultural policies, international trade in agricultural products, and the process of economic integration. He is currently involved in studies of the regulation of biotechnology in the United States and the European Union; trade conflicts over food safety and animal health regulations; reform of the agricultural trading system in the World Trade Organization, including the progress in the current round of negotiations; the treatment of agriculture in free trade areas such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and Mercosur; and the changes in the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. Josling is a member of the International Policy Council on Food and Agricultural Trade and former chairman of the executive committee of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium. He holds a visiting professorship at Imperial College at Wye, in the United Kingdom, and is currently president of the UK Agricultural Economics Association. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, and in 2004 he was made a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association.

Mechel S. Paggi is director of the Center for Agricultural Business at California State University, Fresno. He has a history of work in domestic and international agricultural policies, serving as a principal analyst for agriculture with the Congressional Budget Office, and executive director of the Congressionally mandated Commission on 21st Century Agriculture, which provided recommendations to Congress and the George W. Bush administration on the 2002 farm bill. He has also served as senior economist at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy, and as senior economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. Paggi is the author of numerous journal articles and professional papers on agricultural trade and policy, and has received awards from the American Agricultural Economics Association for quality of communication in public policy education and group extension programming in farm policy.

Mitch Renkow is a professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University. His research and extension activities focus on community and rural development, rural-urban land use issues, and local public finance. He regularly advises local government officials on issues related to infrastructure finance. He has published widely in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, and was a senior fellow of the Southern Rural Development Center and the Rural Development Research Consortium.

Daniel A. Sumner is the director of the University of California Agricultural Issues Center and the Frank H. Buck Jr. Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he has been since 1993. Sumner is the author of scores of professional articles, chapters, and reports, and is the author, coauthor, or editor of several books, including the AEI Press volume Agricultural Trade Policy: Letting Markets Work. Sumner was previously a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and assistant secretary for economics at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). At USDA, he supervised the department’s economic and statistical work and provided policy advice to the secretary and other officials regarding General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations and the Farm Bill, among other issues.

Conference Discussants and Moderators:

Ken Cook is president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public interest research and advocacy organization that uses the power of information to protect human health and the environment. The author of dozens of articles, opinion pieces, and reports on environmental, public health, and agricultural topics, Cook was named one of Washington’s top lobbyists by the Hill. Cook is a regular source of environmental perspective and commentary in national print and broadcast media. He has made frequent appearances on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s Good Morning America, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, among other programs. Cook is known for his decades of research and advocacy to reform agriculture policy to advance conservation and environmental protection. At the onset of debate over the 1995 Farm Bill, a front-page story in the Des Moines Register named Cook as one of the five most influential players in agricultural policy, alongside then-senator Bob Dole, Leon Panetta (then the head of the Office of Management and Budget), then–USDA secretary Mike Espy, and former Farm Bureau head Dean Kleckner. A front-page profile in the Omaha World Herald in 1996 said, “[Cook’s] fingerprints can be found on nearly two decades of U.S. farm law.” In 2000, Progressive Farmer named Cook one of agriculture’s most influential leaders in the twentieth century, alongside advocates like Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold. The New York Times credited EWG’s website on farm policy with helping “transform the [2002] farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country’s wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business.”

Daren Coppock is chief executive officer of the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG). As CEO, he is responsible for implementing policy created by the board of directors, including advocacy before Congress and federal agencies on topics including federal farm policy, environmental regulation, biotechnology, transportation, trade, and biomass production. He is responsible for all aspects of the organization as well as the activities of its affiliated nonprofit foundation and WheatPAC, the wheat industry’s political action committee. Coppock came to NAWG from his home state of Oregon, where he served for five years as the executive vice president of the Oregon Wheat Growers League (OWGL). Prior to that, he held the post of member services director for the OWGL and served as the first full-time administrator of the Oregon Grains Commission.

Stephen Frerichs owns and operates his own consulting company, AgVantage LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. He specializes in budget, agricultural, and credit issues and has over twenty years of agricultural policy experience. Prior to forming his company, Frerichs was the manager of the American Association of Crop Insurers. He represented crop insurance companies and agents in Washington, D.C. Mr. Frerichs also has extensive experience with the executive branch. He was a senior program examiner and deputy branch chief in the Agriculture Branch of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Executive Office of the President, for nearly eight years. At OMB, he advised OMB policy officials on agricultural planning, budget, legislation, and regulatory issues.

James K. Glassman is a resident scholar at AEI and editor in chief and executive publisher of The American magazine. He is cofounder of TechCentralStation.com (now TCSDaily.com), an online journal started in 2000 that focuses on the nexus of science and public policy. For ten years he wrote a syndicated weekly column on investing for the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune. He currently writes a monthly column for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. His opinion pieces appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and other periodicals. Mr. Glassman was previously editor and co-owner of the daily Congressional newspaper Roll Call, publisher of the New Republic magazine, president of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and executive vice president of U.S. News and World Report. He was host of two weekly TV programs, Capital Gang Sunday on CNN and TechnoPolitics on PBS, and currently appears often on cable and TV programs discussing the economy and markets. He has written two books on investing, most recently The Secret Code of the Superior Investor, which was praised as one of the top ten financial books of the year by Business Week and Barron’s. President George W. Bush named Mr. Glassman to the President’s Commission on the 21st Century Workforce, and he served on the Congressionally mandated Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World. He is a member of the Policy Advisory Board of Intel Corp. and the board of trustees of the U.S. Chamber Foundation, and is a senior advisor to SAP Corp.

Ralph E. Grossi is the president of American Farmland Trust, a national organization working to stop the loss of productive farmland and to promote farming practices that lead to a healthy environment. He is a third-generation Marin County, California, farmer who holds a number of national awards in his field, including the 1976 award for Outstanding Young Farmer and Rancher of the California Farm Bureau Federation, the 1985 Feinstone Environmental Award, and the 2002 Man of the Year in Service to Agriculture award presented by Progressive Farmer magazine. He is currently serving on the board of directors of Smart Growth America, a coalition of national and regional organizations. Additionally, he serves on the advisory board of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, on the President’s Advisory Commission on Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of California, and on the board of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election, and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including the AEI book on tax reform, Toward Fundamental Tax Reform. He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on The Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Mark D. Lange is the president and chief executive officer of the National Cotton Council of America, a position he assumed in February 2003. Prior to that, Lange served as the council’s vice president of policy analysis and program coordination. Before being named to that position in 2001, he was director of the council’s economic services and information services departments. He plays a pivotal role in guiding the industry’s seven segments to reach consensus on critical policies affecting U.S. cotton, with the overall mission of helping each of the seven segments compete effectively and profitably in global markets. Prior to joining the council in 1990, Lange was an associate professor of agricultural economics at Louisiana State University. He has served in a variety of capacities with regional and national agricultural economic associations. In 2005, he was named to the Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee for Trade, which provides the secretary of agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative with advice and information on negotiating objectives, bargaining positions, and other matters related to the development, implementation, and administration of U.S. agricultural trade policy.

Philip I. Levy studies international trade and development at AEI. Before joining AEI, he handled international economic issues as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff (2005–06), was senior economist for trade on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2003–05), and was a faculty member in Yale University’s Department of Economics (1994–2003). An economist by training, he has experience in many international trade and development policy issues, including free trade agreements, trade with China, antidumping policy, welfare effects of globalization, U.S. foreign assistance policy, and economic development policy.

Matthew M. McInerney is the executive vice president of Western Growers, a trade group with nearly 3,000 members that represents nearly half the nation’s fresh fruit, vegetable, and nut producers. He currently serves on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fruit and Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee and is vice chairman of the U.S./Canada Trade Task Force. He is also involved in policy-related matters connected to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. He has served on the North American Free Trade Area Advisory Committee for Commercial Dispute Resolution Regarding Agricultural Goods, and is the chairman of the Dispute Resolution Corporation, a tri-national organization comprised of members from Canada, Mexico, and the United States, which promotes standards for the fair and ethical trading of produce among those three countries. McInerney, a thirty- year veteran of Western Growers, has dedicated his career to the fruit and vegetable industry.

Katherine (Kitty) R. Smith is acting administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS). As a researcher and research manager, her principal areas of expertise arrre policy analysis—particularly agricultural and natural resource policies—and the relationships among agricultural production and environmental quality. Her work is published in several books and a range of scholarly journals, USDA reports, and popular outlets. As a research administrator, she was awarded the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Executives in 2001. Kitty has twenty-five years of experience with ERS. Previous positions held within the USDA include director of the Market and Trade Economics Division, and director of the Resource Economics Division. From 1993 to 1996, Ms. Smith was Policy Studies Program director for the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture. From 1989 to 1991, she was a senior fellow with the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy at Resources for the Future.

Charles W. Stenholm is a former House representative (D-Tex.). He was elected to the United States Congress in 1978, where he served for twenty-six years. During his entire career in the House of Representatives he was a member of the Agriculture Committee, and in his last eight years he a ranking member. He also served on the Budget, Small Business, Veterans, and Armed Services Committees. While in Congress, Stenholm earned a reputation for building bipartisan alliances in areas as diverse as agriculture, budget, resource conservation, food safety, energy, health care, and social security. He was founder and co-chairman of the Blue Dog Coalition, Public Pension Reform Caucus, and the U.S.-Mexico Business Caucus. In 1965, he became executive vice president of the Rolling Plains Cotton Growers, and in 1968 became general manager of Stamford Electric Cooperative. Stenholm is currently employed at Olsson, Frank and Weeda, P.C., as a senior policy advisor. He also serves on the boards of directors of the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the American Council of Capital Formation, America’s Heartland, and the International Conservation Caucus Foundation.

Ann Tutwiler is the managing director for trade and development at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Prior to joining Hewlett, she was president and chief executive officer of the International Food and Agriculture Trade Policy Council, an organization that she co-founded in 1987. She was associate director of the International Policy Council—an organization dedicated to developing and advocating policies that support an efficient and open global food system and sustainable production and distribution of safe, accessible food supplies—from its inception until 1992. She has published dozens of articles and edited two books on international agriculture policies, and speaks widely on variety of agricultural policy issues. She recently received the John W. Kuykendall Alumni Service Award from Davidson College for her work in agricultural trade and development. She is a member of the advisory council for the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College, and serves on the boards of directors of the International Fertilizer Development Center and the Grains and Oilseeds Agricultural Trade Advisory Committee

View Event Details