Did you know nearly one in five pounds of all potatoes grown in the United States is exported outside our borders? That is a bundle of potatoes consumed by foreign consumers—at least by those who have access to U.S. potatoes and products, as not every market around the world does. That’s where I come in. The U.S. Potato Board (USPB) brought me on board in August 2014 to work on opening even more overseas markets, keeping the ones we trade in fully open, and digging up new opportunities to sell even more potatoes in the global marketplace.
I may be relatively new to your industry, but I’m not new to agricultural trade. I came to the USPB by way of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), the federal government’s primary international agency focused on food, feed and fiber trade issues. While there, I worked closely with U.S. agriculture trade groups—like USPB—to focus U.S. trade policy priorities on resolving the issues that matter most to stakeholders like you.
In my USPB role in the marketing department under chief marketing officer John Toaspern, I collaborate with our partner organizations, the National Potato Council (NPC) and state potato organizations, plus the American Potato Trade Alliance (APTA) through our consultants at Bryant Christie Inc. As a potato team, we maintain close contact with the organizations of the federal government such as FAS, USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and the staff of the U.S. Trade Representative Office of Agricultural Affairs (USTR), to understand reasons why potato movement may be restricted in certain countries around the world.
Global trade liberalization organizations and free trade agreements have accomplished much in getting potatoes and potato products into countries that are willing to make changes without getting something big in return.
This means the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, has already been harvested. The biggest impact that stands to be made in potato market access would be by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, which brings together the United States with some of our largest trading partners.
We stand to gain the most advantage for potatoes in closer ties with Japan and Vietnam, two of our most significant current potato-importing markets. When the TPP is concluded, these two markets are expected to make access of potatoes easier, thereby making U.S. potatoes and potato products less expensive for their consumers.
The NPC, APTA and state potato organizations already support trade promotion authority (TPA), which may help the approval of the TPP trade agreement. That’s just about the only way the agriculture sector, including U.S. potato growers, will garner benefits from this significant 12-nation trade pact. In the absence of TPA, future major market access achievements will certainly be harder to attain with our trading partners.