Alex F. McCalla

Alex McCalla's leadership and service contributions over the past four decades include many achievements. We want to elaborate on two of them. First is his continuous and truly personal commitment to international economic development. What makes Alex special is the strength of his vision in using his professional knowledge to improve peoples' lives and make the world a better place. The second achievement we wish to emphasize is more directly linked to his contribution to our profession. We believe Alex has made a difference in leading agricultural economists throughout the world to recognize the important linkages between domestic and foreign markets in agricultural policy analyses; in a sense, he was among the very first agricultural economists to "think globally."

Alex McCalla's more professional accomplishments include being one of the founders of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (IATRC), Dean of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the University of California at Davis (UCD), founding Dean of the UCD Graduate School of Management, chair of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and Director of Rural Development at the World Bank, in addition to serving as a mentor and role model for numerous UCD students. Alex truly values teaching, be it in the classroom or while working with others.

In the AAEA, Alex received the 1979 Quality of Communications award, the 1982 Quality of Research Discovery award, became an AAEA Fellow in 1988, and served on the Foundation Board in the 1990s. Additionally, Alex is a Fellow in the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society and received a Doctorate of Science Degree from McGill University in 1998.

Given Alex's commitment to excellence, funds contributed by friends and colleagues of Alex will be placed in the AAEA Foundation to support professional excellence in international outreach, teaching, research and communication in the profession. Alex excelled in each of these areas and it is his wish that the Foundation have flexibility to allocate the earnings from the endowment to its highest priority use over time.