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DES MOINES, Iowa – After being suspended due to a lack of funding, the new farm bill has put controversial export programs back in place.
Without a farm bill, funding for the Market Access Program and Foreign Market Development Program lapsed last year, and both programs were temporarily suspended.
As soon as the Agricultural Act of 2014 passed, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Administrator Phil Karsting says FAS was back in the saddle to help program participants promote U.S. ag products abroad. Last week, FAS announced funding amounts for fiscal year 2014, which began in October of last year.
“If you look at a list of our program beneficiaries,” says Karsting, “it runs the gamut from small and medium enterprises to really emerging markets. And that mix of participants changes over time as well. Just as it’s dynamic, just like American agriculture is dynamic, and so I think we try to go through each year, a very deliberative process to figure out where our expenditures combined with those of our cooperators will do the most, and increase exports the most.”
Among participants, the American Soybean Association received $4,523,434 in MAP funds and $5,198,548 in FMD allocations. Cotton Council International once again received more MAP funds than any other participant: $15,423,937.
The economic impact of both MAP and FMD has been questioned, notably in a Government Accountability Office report out in July of last year. That report determined poor bookkeeping by many participants obscured the true economic impact of the programs:
For many years, MAP and FMD?the two programs that receive most of USDA?s market development funding?have provided continuing assistance to an established pool of agricultural trade associations, primarily to promote generic commodities overseas. FAS has developed a performance monitoring framework in which FMD and MAP participants are expected to develop measurable objectives?that is, constraints and opportunities?linked to performance measures that allow them to annually compare their results with established baselines and goals. Participants generally followed this framework successfully; however, many of the participants? annual country progress reports that we reviewed did not identify, as FAS guidelines require, the methodologies used to assess results for each performance measure. These gaps limit FAS?s ability to determine the reliability of program results reported by participants and to accurately assess participants? progress and success in achieving program objectives.
But Karsting maintains FAS export programs can and do work.
“After the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement went into effect,” he explains, “the Washington Apple Commission came to us, and we worked very diligently with them on a program to enhance consumer familiarity with Washington apples, and their exports under that scenario were pretty impressive. Washington state shipped 4.83 million apples to the market in 2013, and that was a really interesting one, because in 2013, the prices of apples went up, so one would normally think that your [export] volume would go down. But in this case, because we had a very robust and coordinated promotion program in place, despite increases in prices, the volume went up 63%, and the value went up 60%.”
