After twenty years of Ag Mediation’s assistance to the American rural areas, there are a number of key developments which I would like to highlight for the Bureau of Land Management and others interested in mediation and dispute resolution. These include background, law, and efforts by states and federal government to focus on mediation as a way of settling disputes. Finally, I would like to enumerate the lessons we have learned.

Contains a dynamic programming algorithm for projecting policy parameters based on a storage model of international markets featuring uncertainty, forward-looking rational expectations and non-negative storage. This algorithm is motivated by the need for a non-analytical solution to the competitive equilibrium in a storage model of U.S. and foreign cotton policy regimes. Obtaining an analytical solution is difficult, except in a limited number of special cases. The numerical solution algorithm essentially consists of multiple nested numerical approximations that reach convergence simultaneously when the relationship between domestic storage and expected farm price achieves stationarity. Given the stationary relationship between storage and expected farm price, we then run the model forward in time (given a sequence of annual realized yield disturbances) under alternative policy regimes representing FACT and FAIR.

This paper provides a methodology that can be used to weigh the costs and benefits of precision agriculture in the measurement and application of variable-rate production technology. Empirical estimates of the economic value of precision farming in the form of variable-rate fertilizer application to corn fields in the mid-western United States are calculated and compared to the current cost of investing in this technology. The results of this study indicate that the use of precision technology in the application of fertilizer for corn production in the United States is not profitable over a relatively wide range of corn prices, nitrogen prices, and agronomic differences in soil characteristics.

In the “Attacking Global Barriers” or “Phoenix Project”, the Royal Agricultural College and Arizona State University East are working together to insure we have an exciting future in the food management area. This abstract outlines the progress of the Phoenix Project and updates IAMA on the Second Congress of the Phoenix Group. The “Attacking Global Barriers” project focuses on educational and academic issues, and impediments to student movement in the academic year 1998/99. It updates earlier reports to IAMA and gives an overview of the first and second congresses with the American and European Universities.

In 1995/96, the government of Turkey imposed an export tax of 20 cents/kg on Aegean cotton and an ad-valorem import duty of one percent on non-aegean cotton. The simulation results for the Aegean market indicate that consumers gained $44.5 million in consumer surplus because the export tax reduced the purchase price of Aegean cotton. The Turkish government extracted export tax revenue equal to $11.6 million, but provided water, fertilizer, and credit subsidies equal to $22.2 million. Producers lost $35 million in producer surplus due to the lower domestic price caused by the export tax. However, while these numbers represent large transfers from producers to consumers, the net inefficiency due to government distortions amount to only $1.14 million in the Aegean market. Adding this number to the dead-weight loss of only $790,000 obtained from the non-Aegean market simulation, the net inefficiency caused by government intervention in Turkish raw cotton markets was only $1.93 million in 1995/96. If one considers that cotton producers in Turkey realized gross revenue of over $1.4 billion across all markets in 1995/96, the results of the analysis seems to indicate that the income transfer associated with Turkish government programs is not very inefficient.

This manuscript discusses the ongoing debate surrounding the involvement of the Canadian Wheat Board in international trade. The paper outlines a simple test of the ability of the CWB to price discriminate among export markets for the 1980/81 to 1994/95 period. The study finds evidence of the ability of the CWB to price discriminate. It also shows that the magnitude and significance of price discrimination increased during the operation of the U.S. Export Enhancement Program from 1985/86 to 1994/95.

“Commodity promotion” consists of many activities, each designed to contribute to a consumer’s product knowledge or influence tastes. However, both knowledge and tastes are unobservable, or latent, variables influencing demand. This paper specifies a dynamic structural model of fresh fruit demand that treats promotion and other socioeconomic variables as "causal" variables influencing these latent variables. Estimating this state-space model using a Kalman filter approach provides estimates of both the system parameters and a latent variable series. The results show that these latent effects contribute positively to apple and other fruit consumption, while reducing banana consumption.

Proposals for reform of the federal multiple-peril crop insurance program for specialty crops seek to change fees for catastrophic insurance from a nominal fifty-dollar per contract registration fee to an actuarially sound premium. Growers argue that this would cause a significant reduction in participation rates, thus impeding the program’s goals of eventually obviating the need for ad hoc disaster payments and worsening the actuarial soundness of the program. The key policy issue is, therefore, empirical one - whether the demand for specialty crop insurance is elastic or inelastic. Previous studies of this issue using either grower or county-level field crop data typically treat the participation problem as either a discrete insure / don’t insure decision or aggregate these decisions to a continuous participation rate problem. However, a grower’s problem is more realistically cast as one of simultaneously making a coverage level / insurance participation decision. Because the issue at hand considers a significant price increase for only one coverage level (50%), differentiating between these decisions is necessary both from an analytical and econometric standpoint. To model this decision, the paper develops a two-stage estimation procedure based on Lee’s multinomial logit-OLS selection framework. This method is applied to a county-level panel data set consisting of eleven years of the eleven largest grape-growing counties in California. Results show that growers choose among coverage levels based upon expected net premiums and the variance of these returns, as well as the first two moments of expected market returns. At the participation-level, the mean and variance of indemnities are also important, as are several variables measuring the extent of self-insurance, such as farm size, enterprise diversity, or farm income. The results also show that the elasticity of 50% coverage insurance is elastic, suggesting that premium increases may indeed worsen the actuarial soundness of the program. These increases will also cause a significant adjustment of growers among coverage levels.