USDA Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Alexis Taylor, a native Iowan, says she recently led a trade mission to southeast Asia that included stops in Malaysia and Singapore and believes it was very productive.
“One of the things I wanted to highlight, I think, this morning is just the quality of meetings,” Taylor said. “I know our business has had this week. We’ve had over 300 business-to-business meetings, but I think more impactful is the quality of those meetings and the interest of the buyers that I heard from our businesses about. In Southeast Asia, one of the reasons we focus trade missions here or continue to focus some of our trade missions here is the population dynamics that we are seeing. They have a growing middle class.”
This indicates an even bigger potential increase for our agricultural commodities as demand remains strong for American commodities right now.
“There is a strong connection to the United States and a preference for U.S. food and agricultural products,” Taylor said. “There’s a lot of trust in our quality, safety, and reliability as a trading partner, which makes this a very attractive set of markets.”
Now of course she stresses that developing these new markets and these news relationships does take time, and she believes they have gotten started on the right foot with many of the potential buyers. The strategy remains in developing markets for Iowa and U.S. ag commodities is more diversification, rather than relying on two or three large buyers and as a result being at risk of their seemingly always changing political atmospheres.
