Reviewing, Reviewers and the Scientific Enterprise

Despite their critical importance to the scientific enterprise, reviewers receive no formal training and reviewing has become a skill that they pick up through trial and error. Additionally, because most reviewers do not receive any feedback on their performance, any bad reviewing habits become entrenched over time. This has contributed to significant and unnecessary anxiety about reviewing and to antagonistic encounters between reviewers and authors. This paper seeks to correct this situation by defining reviewers as co-creators of scholarship and the reviewing as a quality control process in the production of scientific scholarship. The paper provides three groups of activities aimed at creating the right mindset among reviewers to facilitate this co-creation and quality control perspective: relationships, commitment and honest decisions and recommendations.reviewers, reviewing, scientific enterprise, scholarship, co-creations, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Opportunities for African Small Farmers in Ethical Foods Markets: An Entrepreneurial Perspective

Income growth in many countries is fuelling expansion of the ethical consumer segment and creating an unprecedented opportunity for small African farmers. The challenge is how to organize these farmers to seize the opportunities being offered by the emerging market. We argue in this paper that the development of entrepreneurial perspectives on small farmers’ realities could help alleviate the current economic challenges confronting them. We suggest increased engagement between researchers and academics with producers in entrepreneurial ventures to seize these opportunities. This is new model of economic development focuses on microeconomic solutions through entrepreneurial initiatives. We believe the agricultural economics profession’s ability to engage producers in this manner will not only increase its relevance but provide needed financial resources to grow education and research programs.Ethical Foods, Farmers, African, Markets, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade, Marketing, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

TRADE LIBERALIZATION AND THE WTO NEGOTIATIONS AFTER SEATTLE

Trade liberalization has been received around the world with mixed emotions. The completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in December 1993 brought conversations about international trade into the conversation of the general public in a significant way for the first time. What is most important, individuals against or concerned about increased global trade have successfully organized themselves into forces of recognition, taking the conversations about trade from the back rooms into the streets. This was manifest at the Third, or Seattle, Ministerial Conference which was aimed at ushering in the Next Round of Trade Negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 1999. During the volatile week in Seattle in December 1999, the focus of the media was primarily on the demonstrations and riots on the streets, with little or no coverage of the activities going on in the meetings at the Ministerial Conference. The WTO was unable to make a Ministerial Declaration to launch the next round of trade negotiations, leading some to think that any international trade liberalization effort has been derailed because of the demonstrations and riots. A number of questions emerge as a result of the events emanating from the Seattle Ministerial Conference, but three of these are of specific interest to this author: 1. What really happened at the Seattle Ministerial and why? 2. What are the implications of what happened to global trade negotiations in the future? 3. Why should Canada care? This paper addresses the above questions, looking at the issues leading up to the Ministerial, the structure of the Ministerial agenda and the positions tabled by various countries in an attempt to understand the outcome of the Seattle Ministerial. It also looks at the changes in the membership of the WTO and the negotiation processes and how these affect future global trade negotiations. We also assess the increasing importance of trade to Canada, arguing that there is an important role for Canada in the current negotiation to ensure its successful conclusion. The layout of the paper is as follows. The next section presents a brief summary of the built-in agenda that was agreed to at the end of the Uruguay Round, explaining the evolving nature of international trade rules and the changes that have occurred in international trade relations since the WTO came into force on January 1, 1995. The section following presents the agenda of the Seattle Ministerial, the positions on the critical subjects of negotiations including agriculture, implementation and rules, market access tabled by the various countries and condition that created for the ability of the Seattle Ministerial to achieve its objectives. The final section presents developments at the WTO since Seattle and what that means for Canada's agri-food industries.International Relations/Trade,

On the Development of an Ethical Demand Theory

As an increasing number of consumers shift to demand products on the basis on production practices, animal welfare protocols, human rights initiatives, it is becoming important that we develop new tools for evaluating the decision-making frameworks in the ethical products market place. This paper draws on the behavioral economics and the principal-agent literature to provide a framework for conducting such analyses.Demand and Price Analysis,

Sensemaking, Entrepreneurship and Agricultural Value-Added Businesses

Agricultural producers have been experiencing significant income pressures, leading to a search for alternative sources of income. One of such is value-added agricultural businesses that allow the farmers to stay on the farm and undertake entrepreneurial ventures to improve their finances. How do farmers make sense of their environment as they consider their options for value-added business ventures? This paper presents a sensemaking model and links it to entrepreneurship decisions, allowing us to explain how producers may make such decisions.Agribusiness,

Consumers and the Evolution of New Markets: The Case of the Ethical Foods

Changes in consumer preferences have frequently created new markets for new products. This paper explores the antecedents of the changes in consumer preferences and the factors influencing the evolution of niche markets into commodity markets and its speed. The results show that the more embedded characteristics products have and more consumption is driven by attitude, the longer products are able to maintain their uniqueness and the slower their evolution to commodities.Ethical consumers, New Markets, Consumer choice, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Continuing the Tradition: Employing Tested and Emerging Economic Tools in Framing Sustainability Challenges for a Global Economy

Economists have been successful in bringing their definitional and analytical tools to many of the problems that have confronted society over the past century and more, from Smith’s explanation of how nations produce wealth to Arrow’s explanation of the impossibility of social choice and Keynes’ general theory of money and interest. With the issue of sustainability, we draw on economic agents’ attempts at rational choice under uncertainty to understand the opportunities and challenges. We argue that employing system dynamic modeling approach to the problem could offer careful assessment of the soundness of sustainability strategies.Sustainability, Adaptive Management, System Dynamic Modeling, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

System Dynamic Approach to Assessing New Product Introduction: The Case of Functional Foods in the United States

Health care costs particularly those associated with chronic health conditions such as cancer have been significantly increasing for both individuals and governments in the past decades, prompting the demand for preventative medical initiatives, such as functional food, and spawning a new industry in the food sector functional food industry. This article conducts a feasibility study for a firm entering the functional food industry with a specific product, Avert®, CLA-enhanced cheese. It also assesses alternative market conditions under which the firm will be successful. A system dynamics framework is used for the analyses. The results show that a firm can be profitable in the functional food industry provided that it satisfies certain pricing and target market conditions. The results indicate that the extent to which the market differentiates Avert® from commodity cheese, and hence the premium it pays, is a critical success factor for the firm introducing the product.Agribusiness,

Research Faculty, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization: The Case of Kansas State University

In this study, we assess the relationships between the demographic characteristics of researchers and their perspectives on entrepreneurship and the commercialization of their inventions, and analyze the relationship between faculty perceptions of university commercialization policies and their entrepreneurial orientation. We conclude that there is a need for effective educational programs to address each of the issues and increase awareness among faculty and researchers.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Do Inspection and Traceability Provide Incentives for Food Safety?

One of the goals of inspection and traceability is to motivate suppliers to deliver safer food. The ability of these policies to motivate suppliers depends on the accuracy of the inspection, the cost of failing inspection, the cost of causing a foodborne illness, and the proportion of these costs paid by the supplier. We develop a model of the supplier's expected cost as a function of inspection accuracy, the cost of failure, and the proportion of the failure cost that is allocated to suppliers. The model is used to identify the conditions under which the supplier is motivated to deliver uncontaminated lots. Surprisingly, our results show that when safety failure costs can be allocated to suppliers, minimum levels of inspection error are required to motivate a supplier to deliver uncontaminated lots. This result does not hold when costs cannot be allocated to suppliers. As a case study, we use our results to analyze the technical requirements for suppliers of frozen beef to the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service.diagnostic error, food safety, inspection, sampling error, traceability, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,