Vol. 7(1) Spring 00

From the Editor

This issue of the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education starts the seventh year of publishing feature research articles, commentary issues and tools for the international agricultural and extension profession. The Journal has matured into an important publication for scholarly professionals in the United States and around the world who strive to improve world-wide agricultural and extension education programs.

Yet, if the Journal is to continue to be a well respected professional journal your help is needed. The membership of the Association for International Agricultural and Extension Education and the readership of the Journal need to promote the Journal to friends and colleagues throughout the world. In order to select the most rigorous and quality manuscripts we need a critical-mass of papers submitted. The last six months has seen a drop in the number of feature articles, commentary articles and tools for the profession papers submitted for publication in the Journal.

Recently, I had the opportunity to promote the Journal to the Director of the Cooperative Extension System in the state of Idaho. He was so impressed he informed every county extension educator about the Journal and the opportunity to publish their writings. I have since received several inquiries about submitting papers for potential publication in the Journal. This can be done in every state across the country. If you know of Extension Directors, Associate Deans or Deans of Colleges of Agriculture who do not know about the Journal, please share this copy with them. If you need complimentary copies sent to any potential subscribers or authors please let me know. With everyone’s help we can increase the readership and submissions to the Journal.

Once again, this issue has several outstanding papers for your reading. Dr. Nick Place and his co-authors share with us the successes of the Polish-American Extension Project in the first article. Dr. David Acker and Victor Udin discuss Iowa State’s Linkage Project with the National Agricultural University of Ukraine in the article on page 17.

Last fall AIAEE President Satish Verma and Dr. John Richardson attended the European Association of Extension Education (ESEE) Conference held in Cracow, Poland. During the meeting they encouraged the authors of several papers to submit their writings to the Journal. The first article from the conference comes to us from Eelke Wielinga, former extension expert from the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. His article on Rural Extension in Vital Networks: Changing Roles of Extension in Dutch Agriculture provides us with a window into extension education in the Netherlands. On page 37, Wayne Ganpat, Joseph Seepersad and Isaac Bekele from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad discuss the use and non- use of credit by limited-resource farm housholds in Trinidad. After the outstanding 1999 AIAEE Conference in Trinidad and Tobago, all AIAEE members should be interested in improving their knowledge of agriculture on those most beautiful islands.

Improving our knowledge of international agriculture issues is the focus of the two commentary articles in this issue. Dr. James Diamond shares with us his vast knowledge of agricultural and extension education in Albania. As professionals in higher education, we should all be interested in David Acker’ and Colin Scanes’ article on globalizing undergraduate education and student learning at Colleges of Agriculture.

Finally, there is information provided about two upcoming conferences related to international agricultural and extension education. I hope AIAEE members will continue to take advantage of these and other conferences to improve their knowledge and skills in international agricultural and extension education programming.