MAY 1996
U.S. Ag Exports: That's Where the Numbers Are
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Prairie Grains is the
official publication of
the Minnesota
Association of
Wheat Growers,
North Dakota Grain Growers Association,
South Dakota Wheat,
Inc., and the
Minnesota Barley
Growers Association.
Jensen, former assistant secretary for marketing and regulatory programs at USDA, offered the following USDA statistics as support to a glowing performance of U.S. ag exports:
Every 60 minutes, about $6 million in U.S. agricultural products will be consigned for export to foreign markets. The $6 million is the average break-down to what this nation's producers and processors export on average every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The United States has roughly 260 million consumers and a relatively mature market. But the world population is growing by 90 to 95 million people a year. That means every three years, there's more new mouths to feed than the entire U.S. population.
U.S. agricultural exports have more than doubled since the 1985 Farm Bill.
1995 marked 36 straight years of agricultural trade surpluses, in stark contrast to the deficits in non-agricultural trade.
Not only are we the world's largest exporter, but we are the world's most improved competitor. Overall, the U.S. share of the world agricultural trade reached 23 percent in 1995, the highest level in a decade. This makes the U.S. the leading ag exporter in the world with a growing lead over our largest competitor-the European Union.
The export success of 1995 reflects growth in a broad diversity of customers and products. Exports to our number one buyer, Japan, topped $10 billion for the first time. Records were also set in other key Asian markets, including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, which registered the most impressive growth, as U.S. ag exports there increased 175 percent.
We are on pace to increase U.S. ag exports by 50 percent by 2000, which would not only result in a projected 13 percent increase in net farm income, but tens of thousands of more jobs in the ag sector.
As important as bulk commodities are to ag exports, high-value, consumer-ready, and semi-processed ag products are the fastest growing segments of the global market. In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of all our exports were bulk commodities. Now, they account for less than 50 percent of all exports. In the same time period, consumer-ready foods went from less than 10 percent of all exports to nearly 40 percent.