Since spring 1967 when the late Sen. Robert Kennedy and former Sen. Joseph Clark ‘officially” discovered hunger in less-visited areas of the South, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, several books, a television documentary and numerous committees conferences, and agencies have focused on the incidence and consequences of inadequate nutrition in America. Several private and public programs have been created to help alleviate food and nutrition problems of the poor. Among the nutrition education programs, the expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (ENP) is perhaps the most notable. The major aim of ENP is to improve the diets of low-income families by offering homemakers free instruction in food budgeting and shopping, choice and preparation of nutritious meals and in other topics. Instruction is given by aides who personally visit the homes of participating lamilies to discuss these topics with the homemaker.

Each generation believes it has a monopoly on crises. Its spokesmen declare how exceptional are the perils of its day. Crossroads are invariably said to loom ahead.

It is, therefore, with diffidence that I declare my uneasy feeling that our nation is approaching a crisis decision as to the kind of economy and kind of government that are to prevail through ending years of our century. I am not timid to the point of silence because I have not customarily played a Cassandra role. My direst warnings have been of prospective demise of central markets for setting cattle prices.

A growing awareness of the need for a comprehensive approach to regional and local planning for studying urban and rural areas as parts of an interrelated socio-economic system has stimulated interest in the problem of delineating economic regions, areas, and sub-areas. The Office of Business Economics, U. S. Department of Commerce, has designated 173 economic sub-areas in the U. S. for purposes of planning by federal agencies. State governments are also busy delineating planning areas for state and local agencies. Ten such planning areas were designated in South Carolina by executive order of the Governor in March 1969. Presumably, future public policies and programs in such fields as natural resource management, industrial development, housing, and highway construction, etc., will be designed and implemented on the basis of these spatial delineations.

Regular hired farm workers, performing 150 days or more of farm work annually, became increasingly important in the 1970's. The number of regular hired workers in the United States increased by almost 50 percent during the decade, while the number of seasonal workers, operators, and unpaid family workers declined. Pricing of regular hired labor is investigated through estimation of three nested wage determination models in a case study analysis for Georgia. Micro-level data on individual workers were used to analyze the effects of general human capital, farm worker duties, local labor market conditions, and farm characteristics on wage rates.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. households received economic impact payments through several federal aid programs. Simultaneously, the U.S. food sector experienced dramatic shifts in the source of demand and consumer spending behavior. Motivated by this, we evaluate the associations between federal financial assistance and both household food-at-home and food-away-from-home expenditures. The first two economic impact payments were associated with increased spending on food-at-home, while only the first was associated with increased spending on food away from home. All three payments were associated with an increased probability of spending on food away from home.

Fed cattle profitability is determined by complicated dynamic processes of body growth, carcass development, and seasonal prices. A structural model is constructed to contend with all these dynamic processes to predict optimal market timing. Informed simulations are conducted and compared to those observed in the data, as well as to a previous model ignoring the evolution of carcass value. The results indicate that significant improvements to profitability are attainable with the new method. The results also indicate the opportunity cost of not accounting for carcass value, even with error, is more severe than when these dynamics are ignored.

We estimate a travel cost model for the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests using an On-Site Latent Class Poisson Model. We show that the constraints of ad-hoc truncation and homogenous preferences significantly impact consumer surplus estimates derived from the on-site travel cost model. By relaxing the constraints, we show that more than one class of visitors with unique preferences exists in the population. The resulting demand functions, price responsive behaviors, and consumer surplus estimates reflect differences across these classes of visitors. With heterogeneous preferences, a group of ‘local residents’ exists with a probability of 8% and, on average take 113 visits.

The three articles presented at this invited session examine the evolution of water policy planning and the implementation of regulatory tools to achieve water conservation objectives. Two articles focus on Texas water issues and the third focuses on the Georgia planning experience. Each article clearly illustrates the value of sharing advances in hydrologic and economic modeling with local community stakeholder groups to facilitate the credible development of regional water management plans. Moreover, each article hints that stronger regulatory tools may be needed to achieve long-run policy objectives.

Qualitative models can be used for decision making under uncertainty. This provides a useful framework for evaluating the models. If the costs for every action/state of nature combination are known, decisions made using a well-calibrated model would result in actual costs being close to expected costs. In addition, the actual cost can be compared to the cost of perfect foresight actions, giving a bound on the value of a better model. Application of these procedures is made using a logit model developed to predict Missouri country grain elevator bankruptcies.

Payment arrangements among members of a cooperative play a critical role in the performance of the cooperative. The impact of three payment systems is assessed for Florida sugarcane cooperatives through a bi-level programming model which incorporates both individual and collective behavior.

Money and capital markets exist to provide an exchange system for debt and equity instruments-money substitutes with time dimensions. This financial intermediation process is a two-way flow. The funds-flow originates with savers and terminates with the ultimate borrowers or users of the saved funds. The securities flow originates with ultimate borrowers and ends with primary savers. In addition to savers and borrowers, the principal participants are the financial intermediaries: those firms in which (a) claims on and to others dominate among assets and liabilities and (b) economic activities center upon the purchase and sale of such claims.

The Food Stamp Act authorizes the distribution of food coupons (stamps) to households which meet certain income eligibility requirements. This legislation enables low-income households to buy more food of greater variety to improve their diet. In fiscal 1979, the cost of the Food Stamp Program amounted to $6.7 billion and the number of persons participating in the program averaged 18.9 million.

The Food Stamp Program (FSP) began in 1939 on a limited basis. In 1961, President Kennedy created an experimental Food Stamp Program that became nationwide after enactment of the Food Stamp Act of 1964. The two main purposes of the FSP are to improve the nutritional status of low income families and to support farm income by increasing food demand. The cost of the FSP rose from $1.8 billion in 1972, to $6.9 billion in 1979. This dramatic increase has motivated a considerable research effort to evaluate the program. This research can be classified into three broad categories (that are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

In an article titled, “Application of Price Elasticities to Farm Policy Analysis,” Bateman and Stennis [1] present an intriguing analysis of the use of demand elasticities for U.S. farm policy in the world market perspective. They present two different approaches to demonstrate the importance of the world market to U.S. agriculture and conclude that unilateral reduction in production of U.S. farm products is not likely to enhance and to maintain farm income unless the farm commodities under consideration are almost perfectly inelastic in the world market and/or the U.S. is the only or dominant source of supply. The analyses are based on the estimated elasticities and the logic of economic deduction.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the strategic forces shaping U.S.-Mexico trade relationships and the possibilities of extending the trade agreement to the rest of the Americas. The paper concludes that constituency interests, party loyalty, the proportion of a state's population of Hispanic origin, and the influence of textile-related employment in the state were significant explanatory factors in the Congressional Fast Track vote that occurred in May of 1991.

Produce growers in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee were surveyed in 2002 to gather information about their decision making in the areas of planting, postharvest handling, marketing, and expected changes. North Carolina has proportionately more respondents with large operations, and Kentucky and Tennessee were more similar and concentrated in smaller farms. Tennessee and Kentucky respondents were less likely to have engaged in activities that were associated with the commercial distribution system. Greater reliance on the commercial distribution system on the part of North Carolina growers is consistent with more produce export activity.

The objective of this study is to identify experimental economic tools that can be employed to explain the role of economic behavior in overweight and obesity in the household. We identify three economic experiments that can be used to understand how parent-child economic relationships relate to obesity. Loss aversion experiments are discussed as a tool to understand challenges some individuals face in achieving a healthy diet. Finally, testbed experiments are introduced as a means to test and understand new policies and incentives for better health at the household level.

Four policy alternatives for CRP lands upon expiration of the current contracts in Hale County, Texas are evaluated using chance-constrained programming. It was found that if CRP contracts are extended at the current average rental rate, 40 percent of the current enrollment would be expected to return to crop production, while 66 percent would return to crop production if the program were eliminated. The results also indicate that the marginal value of CRP payments to producers is lower than the marginal value of deficiency payments.

This research examines the success of stabilization policies to control hyperinflation in Bolivia. Money demand functions for the hyperinflation and stabilization periods were econometrically estimated and statistically tested. We conclude that the demand for money in Bolivia changed after stabilization policies were implemented, indicating that the new government's objectives were met. Stabilization policies resulted in real economic growth for Bolivia's economy, including its agricultural sector, where agricultural export shares increased tenfold as stabilization policies corrected overvalued exchange rates.