The International Association of Agricultural Economists grew out of a conference hosted by Leonard Elmhirst at his home in Dartington Hall, Devon, England in late August and early September 1929.
Fifty agricultural economists from 11 countries attended. There were representatives from Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Trinidad, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Those present felt they had gained so much in improved understanding of both the differences and commonalities in the problems they faced in research and teaching. They resolved to find ways to increase their contacts and promote greater understandings among themselves and their colleagues.
With generous financial support from the Carnegie Endowment and the Elmhirst family a second Conference was held at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., in August 1930 with 309 representatives from 20 countries attending. 234 were from the US and Canada coming from 30 states and 5 provinces. A Constitution for IAAE was developed and adopted under the leadership of Arthur Ashby (Aberystwyth, UK). The Conference extended over ten days with presentations from 84 speakers. It was agreed that the proceedings should be published for the first two conferences under the leadership of F.F. Hill, one of the subsequent leaders in the founding of IRRI, CIMMYT and the international agricultural research centres. Many of the traditions of our Conferences stem from these beginnings.
The proceedings volumes generally included nearly all the International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE) papers up through the 1973 meeting. Subsequently, an Occasional Papers series carried many of the contributed papers, and the proceedings volume held plenary papers, the ICAE program, Presidential Address, and Elmhirst Lecture. In the meantime, IAAE had initiated a journal Agricultural Economics in 1986. In 1997, it started carrying a selection of contributed papers from the conference. In addition, in 2003, AgEcon Search at the University of Minnesota began posting all contributed papers and poster abstracts from each triennial conference, along with gray literature from many departments of agricultural economics in the United States and increasingly worldwide
For more information visit: https://iaae-agecon.org/
