Agricultural Economics: A Profession in Transition

The premise of this paper is that agricultural economics, as a distinct subdiscipline of economics, faces perhaps the most serious challenges since struggling for a separate identity nearly a century ago. I fully appreciate the fact that nearly all professional presidential addresses key on the theme of change to one extent or another. However, the environment within which we practice our profession is undergoing such significant transition that I believe radical changes are needed in how we frame and implement our instructional, research, and outreach programs. In his 1986 American Agricultural Economics Association presidential address, Joe Havlicek identified five megatrends affecting agriculture that he believed would have profound implications for our profession: (1) food consumption changes, (2) internationalism and macroeconomic forces, (3) technological change, (4) structural change, and (5) environmentalism.