The strength of agricultural economics is not that it can compete with general economics research. People may feel that general economics research is more decent, this is true in the sense that it produces pretty neat and nice work with help of mathematic notation. Mathematics is important, this should be admitted, it is the logic language of this world. So what general economics research does is that it has been employed in the effort of expressing the world, while the agricultural economics research should be dedicated to be more close to the real world, to pass more care to people and entire world's basic needs.
There is a movie which has been putting on the screen for a while, Food Inc. (2008). An American documentary film directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Robert Kenner. The film examines large-scale agricultural food production in the United States, concluding that the meat and vegetables produced by this type of economic enterprise have many hidden costs and are unhealthy and environmentally-harmful. The documentary generated extensive controversy in that it was heavily criticized by large American corporations engaged in industrial food production. This is just an example, so the question is that after popular cost-benefit analysis and its derivative forms and combinations, who really cares about problem like above? Most of time, optimization, maximization, equilibrium and so forth are too perfect to be practical in applications; some other time, human activity and interaction are so of diversity that it is not enough or even it is not neccessary to follow a cost-benefit logic, especially when you have hard time to identify who are beneficiaries and who are victims.
Here is a word I want to share with everyone: we can only and will only win the world by love and responsibility, not by proving; because essentially everything can be proved while nothing cannot be proved eventually.
-- Haoying Wang, 2010
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