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.
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.
John A. Miranowski is a professor in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University. His areas of interest include agricultural economics and environmental and resource economics, and he has taught courses in natural resource and environmental economics, and farm management and production economics. Miranowski served as the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Resources and Technology Division from 1984-95. As the executive coordinator of the secretary of agriculture's Policy Coordination Council and special assistant to the deputy secretary of agriculture (1990-91), Miranowski worked with under and assistant secretaries and with other administrators to develop and implement crosscutting programs on water quality, food safety, rural development, pesticide policy, and workforce diversity.
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.
Vincent H. Smith is a professor of agricultural economics and economics and co-director of the Agricultural Marketing Policy Center at Montana State University. His research interests focus on agricultural commodity, risk management, and science and technology policies.
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.
