DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORY OF HORTICULTURE

Despite the importance of these crops the profession of horticulturists represents a small subset of agricultural scientists that are usually divided on the basis of three commodity groups: pomology or fruit growing; vegetable crops or olericulture; and ornamentals consisting of floricultural and landscape crops.

National and international scientific societies have been organized around these commodity groupings. Because of the strong pull of commodity orientation, our horticultural science societies have become most closely associated with primary commercial production of the major commodities and, usually, the interests of horticultural scientists flag beyond the farm gate. Horticulturists, typically, have little interaction with ultimate and end users of horticultural crops. In our professional careers as academics, teachers, and researchers, our scientific allegiances are often split between our commodity home and scientific disciplinary organizations (e.g. genetics and breeding, physiology and nutrition, economics and marketing). The strong pull of discipline groupings in the new arena of biotechnology has, in many cases, overwhelmed commodity interest and consequently weakened the allegiance of our younger horticultural scientists to the horticultural science societies.

Our scientific societies, by their nature, have become academic appendages and the raison d'etre for their existence has been to provide a forum for communication among ourselves in two ways: convening annual meetings, conferences, symposia, and congresses on the one hand and sponsorship of scientific journals on the other. With the advance of science, our journals have become increasingly arcane and technical as we vie with disciplinary journals for prestige in the academic scientific community. Thus, the immediate relevance of our scientific journals to industry has declined. The industries of horticulture have their own magazines and journals with wide circulation and thus close entree to advertisers. Many of our members, however, contribute to these journals.

Despite the increasing specialization of our scientific societies, the industry of horticulture forges on, in spite of us. Horticultural commodities move into world markets and are stored, conserved, and transformed to important necessities demanded by 5 billion people. Our crops become the raw materials for others who maintain allegiance to other interests and pursuits. In many cases our science societies have lost contact with these groups because our goals are so disparate. An example is the American Society for Horticultural Science with headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, only a few blocks away from the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association. One would expect close coordination between these two groups but we could be in another country for all the contact that exists. We know of each other only because of the accident of proximity. Horticultural

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