Agricultural economics -- it's not just production functions anymore

In recent years, the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA) has provided a forum for researchers interested in economic and policy issues related to food safety and nutrition. There is now an AAEA Food Safety and Nutrition Section (a sort of subsidiary specializing in these topics). The section's leadership includes:

• Elise Golan, branch chief for the Diet, Safety, and Health Economics Branch at USDA's Economic Research Service,
• Andrea Carlson, who might be called a "nutrition economist" at USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion,
• Christine Ranney, a leading expert in food and consumer economics at Cornell,
• Victoria Salin at Texas A&M,
  
• Sandra Hoffman at Resources for the Future, and
  
• Brian Gould, the section's webmaster and one of the very few people in the country who could possibly explain to you how dairy pricing works.

The section's liaison to the full association is the well-known food economist and former head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Per Pinstrup-Andersen.

The full association's annual summer meeting has been increasingly hospitable to research that is way downstream from the farm gate. The deadline for proposed papers for the 2005 summer AAEA meeting is January 14. The association also sponsors sessions at the annual meetings of the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA), which is where mainstream economists throw their wild and crazy avant garde parties every January. In a nice gesture of support for research in this weblog's area of interest, AAEA is sponsoring a session on food assistance programs and food security at the January 2005 ASSA meetings in Philadelphia. In that session, I will give a paper with Mark Nord about whether the Food Stamp Program improves food security. Watch this space in the near future for the answer.