History of the Foundation

The EAAEP Foundation was established in 1972  as the Foundation To Publish ERAE to give legal status to the ERAE and to raise funds for establishing the Review. The first issue of the ERAE was
published in the spring of 1973 with the Dutch firm Mouton as publisher.

Founding fathers were Jan de Veer (at that time vice-director of the Dutch Agricultural Economics Research Institute LEI and first editor of the European Review of Agricultural Economics),  Denis K. Britton (Professor at Wye College, Ashford – Kent, UK) and Philippe Mainié (Professor and member of the Societé Francaise d’Economie Rurale, France).  How the ‘Founding Fathers’ developed the ERAE has been described in a journal article published in the ERAE (See ERAE 21-3/4, p. 597-602).

After 40 years Arie Oskam (Professor Emeritus at Wageningen University, the Netherlands and long-time Honorary Secretary-Treasurer of the Foundation) took the initiative to update the Statutes of the Foundation, including a name change, which became into force in 2013.

The EAAEP Foundation shares a history with the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE), that was established in 1975, a few years after the birth of the Foundation To Publish ERAE (in short often referred to as the Foundation ERAE).  More details are given elsewhere on this site.

The first issue of the ERAE appeared in 1973. Sicco Mansholt (as former Commissioner of Agriculture and Temporary President of the European Commission) wrote the first article, entitled ‘How can agricultural economists help to solve Europe’s agricultural problems?‘.

In 1992 the ERAE became ‘the Official Journal of the EAAE’. This was initiated because the Rabobank provided support to the EAAE-Congress at The  Hague in 1990 and this support was mainly targeted at the Congress issue of the ERAE (Volume 18-3/4). It took a while to include this in the pages of the ERAE, but the first time this shows up is in issue 20-3 of the ERAE in 1993.

From 1995 on the EAAE started to award a prize for the best paper in the ERAE by a young scientist. To qualify the author had to be younger than 35 years. In 2008 this was changed into an award for the best paper (for all ages).

In the 1990s the ERAE went through a number of changes, that made the Foundation more relevant for the existance of the journal. When Arie Oskam (Wageningen University) took over as editor from Kees Burger (originally LEI, later Free University Amserdam and then Wagening University, who succeeded Jan de Veer as editor and later became a long time chair of the Foundation) the Dutch Organisation for fundamental research NWO was still subsidizing the ERAE. Arie Oskam started converting the ERAE to a fully market based journal, where funding had to come from sales to libraries. He became honorary Secretary-Treasurer of the Foundation, and Alison Burrell (Wageningen Univeristy) took over as editor.

During the 1980s, Mouton had merged with the Berlin-based publishing firm Walter de Gruyter. In 1999 publication shifted to Oxford University Press (OUP) and at that time the current ownership arrangements were created: the EAAEP Foundation is the owner of and has the exclusive right to publish the European Review of Agricultural Economics. The copyright in the material published in the ERAE shall be licensed by its authors jointly to the Publisher and the Foundation in equal shares as tenants in common.

In 2007 two new editors (Thomas Heckelei and Paolo Sckokai) joint Alison Burrell and in 2009 she handed over the editorship to Christoph Weiss. At the same time the Board of the Foundation was enlarged. In 2012 Kees Burger stepped down as a long-time chair of the Foundation and a year later Arie Oskam did the same as Honorary Secretary-Treasurer.