Dr. John E. Lee, Jr.

Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Aug 2005

Lifetime Achievement Award

John Lee is professor and department head emeritus in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Mississippi State University. He received his B.S. in Animal Husbandry (1957), his M.S. in Agricultural Economics (1958) from Auburn University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1969.

Lee joined the staff of the USDA's newly created Economic Research Service (ERS) in 1962 and remained there until his retirement in 1993. His early research dealt with economic adjustments on farms in major farming regions of the country and aggregated production response to various policy and economic changes. Some of his early publications dealt with problems of aggregation error in linear programming models of "typical" or "representative" farms. In 1967, he became the chief of the ERS Agricultural Finance Branch. In that position, he guided establishment of a substantive program of research in agricultural finance by chairing and helping to redirect the focus of the National Agricultural Credit Committee, which represented all the public and private long-term lenders in agriculture; becoming heavily involved in the restructuring and modernization of the Farm Credit System; and developing a life-long interest in agricultural finance.

In 1971, Lee became Director of the "old" Farm Production Economics Division of ERS. When that Division was combined with parts of the old Marketing Economics Division in 1973, he became Director of the resulting Commodity Economics Division. As a result of further reorganizations and mergers, he became Director of the National Economic Analysis Division in 1976 and of the National Economies Division in 1979. In the 1976-1980 period, Lee played a leadership role in guiding research and analysis pertaining to secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland's "Structure of Agriculture" project.

In 1981, Lee became Acting Administrator, and, in 1982, he was named Administrator of the ERS. From then until 1993 he guided a gradual reinvention of ERS to make it more of a national "transparency" agency, with emphasis on implications of national and international economic and policy developments. One of the significant efforts that Lee guided during that period was a massive program of research and analysis that provided the foundation for U.S. proposals in the Uruguay Round of the Multilateral Trade negotiations, resulting in the World Trade Organization and a new international regulatory regime to guide global trade.

As ERS Administrator, John Lee developed a close working partnership with other agency administrators, such as with CSREES to improve funding for both formula and competitive grants for social sciences, with the National Agricultural Statistics Service to support improvements in data available to researchers, and with the Foreign Agriculture Service to promote employment of masters'level agricultural economists.

While at ERS, Lee served as a member and later Chair of the General Administrative Board of the USDA Graduate School, which offered college-level courses to over 100,000 students. He was a member of the Congressionally established Joint Council on Food and Agricultural Sciences. He served as a member of the USDA Committee on Biotechnology in Agriculture, the nine-person body that set USDA policy on biotechnology research guidelines and regulation. Lee was active in numerous regional agricultural research and administrative organizations, serving on the executive committees of several of them. He was the leader of one and member of three U.S. delegations to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. In 1992 he chaired a five-member International Visitation Committee to review and evaluate the program of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI-DLO) of The Netherlands Ministry of agriculture, The Hague. Lee authored the 50-page evaluation report, with recommendations to the Institute.

Lee also remains an active supporter of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA) and Southern Agricultural Economics Association (SAEA). He was a charter member of SAEA and served as its Vice President and Program Chairman in 1979-1980. With Ray Goldberg, Vernon Schneider, and others, he helped establish the International Agribusiness Management Association in 1991 and served on the Board of Directors until 1998. He worked closely with USDA activities in support of 1890 Land Grant universities and chaired USDA's Leadership Committee working with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.

John Lee joined the Agricultural Economics faculty at Mississippi State University (MSU) in 1993 following his retirement from USDA-ERS. He served as Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at MSU until his retirement in 2001. Lee guided the revitalization of the Department's research, teaching, and Extension programs and recruited outstanding new faculty members. While he was Department Head, Lee also served as Interim Director of the Southern Rural Development Center in 1996 and 1997.