146 July 1988
Western Journal of Agricultural Economics
□ Non WAEA States & Countries H 13 Western States
El Other WAEA States & Provinces
Figure 1. Geographic distribution of WJAE authorship
meridian.2 Other publication alternatives might
include reestablishment of a proceedings or an
abstracts issue and special invited paper or sur-
vey article issues pertaining to western agri-
cultural and natural resources problems and
policies. Such additions might be a mechanism
to hold western, and westem-like, interests in
the association and provide benefits to the gen-
eral membership wider than those currently
offered solely by our strong professional jour-
nal.
The Annual Meetings
The annual meetings appear to be designed
primarily to meet the contributed paper offer-
ings of agricultural economists and tangen-
tially to offer minimal stimulation to the gen-
eral membership, whether by invited paper
sessions or by recent locations of the annual
2From notes made at the 1986 WAEA business meeting in Reno
conveyed to the author in a letter dated 5 Aug. 1986.
meetings. As DeLoach noted, some meetings
are better than others!
The excitement of the special parts of the
program (i.e., invited paper sessions, address-
es, and the like) is not communicated to the
membership by preannouncement. Who can
find out about the nature of a panel or of a
well-designed invited paper session in a timely
enough manner to develop professional and/
or family vacation plans to attend? Most of
the membership is precluded from knowing
details and making plans to attend on the basis
of detailed program content. It may be that
attendance is determined primarily by paper
selection, secondarily by vacation plans or re-
turn to an alma mater, and tertiarily, if at all,
by the general program or professional inter-
action opportunities of a more general sort.
The expansion of the Association to the
western two-thirds of the United States and
Canada eliminated the geographic proximity
that once ensured that the site of annual meet-
ings would not likely exceed a day and a half
drive in university or personal vehicles. With