The United States leads the world in agricultural biotechnology research, adoption, commercialization, and exports. Our biotech commodities are highly dependent on international markets. Thus, any biotech policy changes by key importing countries may affect U.S. agricultural biotech product exports. This article identifies key markets for U.S. agricultural exports including biotech commodities and discusses current and proposed biotech policies in key markets for U.S. agricultural exports focusing on Canada, Mexico, Japan, the European Union (EU), and China. Among these markets, labeling of biotech products is voluntary in Canada and Mexico but is mandatory in Japan, the EU, and, most recently, in China. For the EU, U.S. corn exports were almost completely shut out, while U.S. soybean exports also declined because of the EU's biotech policies. The World Trade Organization dispute filed by the United States has yet to be finalized. China's biotech regulations raised concern by U.S. agricultural exporters. However, through U.S. Department of Agriculture education programs, U.S.–China negotiations, and China's domestic soybean shortage, China's biotech regulations do not appear to have had long-run impacts on U.S. soybean exports to China.

Recently many state and federal agencies in the U.S. have embraced an ecosystems management approach to environmental protection and regulation. This approach requires a high degree of cooperation between natural and social scientists to translate policy objectives into research hypotheses, models, and evaluation procedures to guide implementation decisions. An adaptive procedure to guide interdisciplinary research is described and illustrated with highlights of recent progress and pitfalls from the restoration initiative for the Everglades/South Florida ecosystem.

Natural resource economics has long been identified as a policy science. Its chief concerns—problems attributable to “market failures” of various kinds (e.g., Castle 1965) and the special difficulties that arise in intertemporal and intergenerational resource allocation (e.g., Solow)—inherently require some kind of public solution, whether it be by reaffirmation or redefinition of property rights, regulation, taxation policy, or public enterprise.

In a time of some general disenchantment with government and selective retrenchment of public sector activity, resource economists (and many other social and economic scientists) are receiving mixed signals. Mostly we tend to work in or for the public sector, the political stock of which is not exactly booming.

The assumption of nonstochastic parameters has long been recognized as restrictive to the solution of many marketing problems and to economic modeling in general. Parameter variation historically has been treated with the use of nonstochastic adjustments through interaction variables and the use of proxy dummy and trend variables. Though these empirical techniques in many cases give reasonable results, they presuppose that the researcher can specify the nature of the parameter change. In fact, it may not be obvious that random parameters are part of the estimation problem. Furthermore, specification of structural shifts in parameters is usually difficult. Comparison of parameter changes through techniques such as grouping of data and using various F-tests is most often dependent on the criteria for grouping (Maddala, p. 390–404). Also, the procedure fails to identify the dynamic path of adjustments that must have occurred when various F-tests indicate that parameters have changed. Other approaches to determining structural shifts in parameters may require elaborate search procedures. To limit the extent to which the search is required, restrictive assumptions about many of the parameters are sometimes made (Simon).

Substantial variations in equity and income of cattle producers and feeders in highly leveraged operations have occurred during the early 1970s as the result of wide variations in prices of cattle and purchased feed. Moreover, severe losses in many commercial feedlots have resulted in greater forage inputs in beef production, with feeder cattle placed in feedlots at heavier weights and for shorter periods of time. The large price uncertainty, together with possible changes in the livestock production system, make cattle producers' search for effective methods of risk management more urgent.

The search is hampered, however, by a limited scope of choices in risk management. Forward price commitments in cattle production have received limited use at the producer level. Public programs of price support and supply management have never been available. Insurance choices are few, as are alternatives for diversifying use of grazing lands and other resources specialized to cattle production. Often, producers' primary methods of risk-bearing are reliance on financial reserves, including unused borrowing capacity, emergency loans provided by public programs and outside sources of income. However, effective opportunities for reduction of income variability may be offered by vertical integration expressed as retention of calf ownership through finishing stages either on pasture or by custom feeding in commercial feedlots.

There is comparatively little empirical evidence regarding the accuracy of regional housing sector forecasts. Much of the recent analysis conducted for this topic is developed for housing starts and indicates a relatively poor track record. This study examines residential real estate forecasts previously published for El Paso, TX using a structural econometric model. Model coverage is much broader than just starts. Similar to earlier studies, the previously published econometric predictions frequently do not fare very well against the selected random walk benchmarks utilized for the various series under consideration.

The age-old conflict between producers and market middlemen in the food industry has surfaced in the finfish industry with respect to market prices, producer prices, and marketing margins. Unrest among fishermen (producers) about the performance of the marketing system for various species of finfish has sparked numerous protests in the United States. Some protests have ended in lawsuits; in other cases, marketing cooperatives and/or marketing associations have been formed to integrate several steps in the marketing process. These events have been common in the Florida Atlantic Coast marketing system.

Interactions among the nitrogen (N) fertilization rate, N source, and disease severity can affect mean yield and yield variance in conservation tillage wheat production. A Just-Pope model was used to evaluate the effects of N rate, N source, and disease on the spring N-fertilization decision. Ammonium nitrate (AN) was the utility-maximizing N source, regardless of risk preferences. The net-return-maximizing AN rate was 92 lb N/acre, providing $0.52/acre higher net returns than the best alternative N source (urea). If a farmer could anticipate a higher-than-average Take-All Root Rot infection, the difference in optimal net returns between AN and urea would increase to $35.11/acre.

Recent increases in the number of resource and industrial developments in rural areas [10] have led to the creation of a large number of comprehensive planning models usually identified as “economic-demographic” projection models [see for example 1, 3, 4, 5]. These models are used to delineate systematically the interrelationships among various economic, demographic, and social factors. They differ in their basic model structure, their degrees of flexibility, and range of user input options, and in terms of the geographic and governmental units for which projections are made. Each, however, includes a basic economic module, a demographic module, and a module for interrelating or interfacing the economic and demographic modules. Additional modules, such as fiscal impact, settlement allocation, public service, and housing demand modules, also may be included but they tend to operate directly on the outputs of one of the other three basic components and are thus largely addendums to the economic, demographic, or interface modules of such models.

Eight input combinations of commercial fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides on a corn-soybean crop rotation in the Brazos River Bottom of Texas are evaluated. Input combinations which do not fully utilize all three inputs are consistently ranked higher by all criteria as the preferred input strategy for the corn-soybean rotation system. These results, which indicate limited input crop rotations that fall somewhere between the extremes of conventional agricultural production and organic agriculture, deserve further attention as a possible production alternative.

An important objective of Japanese agricultural policy since the early 1960s has been to increase farm incomes by raising the farm price of rice, the country's principal agricultural crop (Hayami). This objective was accomplished through a two-tiered pricing scheme administered by the Japanese Food Agency, the country's principal purchaser and seller of rice, which maintained producer support prices at levels higher than the consumer equivalent. However, in recent years, the accumulation of excess rice stocks has forced Japan's policymakers to implement major changes in rice policy to reduce persistent overproduction. These policies include diversion payment programs that provide incentives to divert paddy land to production of priority crops such as wheat, barley, and soybeans, as well as surplus disposal programs that subsidize the disposal of accumulated rice stocks for export, industrial, and feed use. Other policy changes include adjustments in the wholesale (resale) prices of rice and wheat to favor rice consumption, and adjustments in producer support prices to promote production of competing crops. This study analyzes the impact on trade of recent changes in Japanese rice and wheat policy.

International markets for the majority of agricultural commodities are extremely complex. They include public and private traders along with influences from domestic and international government policies. In recent years, the United States has experienced a decline in the market share in two of its major agricultural exports—rice and wheat. For example, at one time the United States had roughly 45 percent of the world wheat market; but, by the end of 1985, its share had dropped below 40 percent. Also, in terms of rice, the United States market share has dropped from 25 percent to below 20 percent.

Seasonal price premiums have been proposed as a means of dampening the highly seasonal patterns of milk production in Florida. A Markov decision bio-economic model of the breeding and replacement decisions was solved via stochastic dynamic programming and used to analyze the potential supply response to seasonal price premiums. The results of the analysis suggest that the seasonal milk supply in Florida is highly price inelastic.

We investigated the environmental impacts of alternative cultural practices within a watershed under different water quality standards. We used experimental data on nutrient runoff to determine the optimal amount of broiler litter application in hay production in Louisiana. To compensate for the lack of experimental data, we used biophysical simulation models to find the optimal combination of agricultural best-management practices in a watershed in Mississippi. The results indicated that stricter environmental standards lower total profit potential and litter utilization.

This series of papers is an excellent opportunity to reacquaint agricultural economists in the Southern region with the exciting field of experimental economics and is indeed opportune in light of the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Vernon Smith, considered by many to be the father of experimental economics. Rather than try to share the limelight with the authors on their far-reaching and comprehensive topics, we plan to take this opportunity to share some of our views of the role of experimental economics in the research laboratory and classroom.

In a recent article, Hildreth and Schaller suggest that researchers can make important contributions to community development programs by analyzing the trade-offs resulting from increasing economic activity in rural communities or moving the people to jobs in other communities, and the subsequent effects of these alternatives on the allocation of community services. Although they concentrate on the delivery of public services to rural communities, it is important to note that urban public service costs are a major factor influencing the current emphasis on “place development,” rather than encouraging rural-to-urban migration.

Two questions commonly raised by cow-calf producers are, “What type of beef animal is most profitable?” and “Can profits be increased by maintaining ownership of calves through the stocker and feeding stages?”

These two questions are highly interrelated as performance in cow-calf stage carries over into the Dostweanine staees.