Washington State Exports Jump

 Washington State Exports Jump. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Even though we have been pulling through a down economy the ag export industry in Washington State has seen near-record fiscal year 2010 sales of $154 million from state export assistance. Janet Leister, Managing Director of International Marketing for the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

LEISTER: We were very pleased with all the work our overseas reps and our international marketing reps did together as a team to help achieve those export sales for individual companies. These figures are - we call them assisted sales but what we do is we call up the companies that we work with and we ask them if they made a sale from the work we did with them so that’s why we call them export assisted sales.

State programs at Commerce and WSDA provide small and medium-sized businesses with export training and counseling, facilitate international trade show participation, and assist with trading partner and market introductions.

LEISTER: The return on investment for the program is $3.86 for every dollar invested in the program but I think that more importantly is that we work with small to medium sized producers and food manufacturing companies and I would call it really the market development work and the long term growth work to help them achieve export sales, either to get into the market or to expand their market sales and then hopefully to expand into more markets and grow.

She says that that also helps to bring more jobs to the market as well with the increase in export sales. This boost in ag and commerce export sales is just building good momentum.

LEISTER: Really we were fortunate this year, I would say we can attribute two things to these sales. One is the growth in China is continuing and we do have a representative in China. We’re going to continue our export growth in China and taking that trend because they’re not in the recession we’re in and then this year we are very fortunate that our representative in Japan was able to do the government negotiations and help a company save their contract in Japan.

Four percent of Washington companies are engaged in exporting today – four times the national average. Clients utilizing WSDA export assistance saw sales grow to $95.8 million for fiscal year 2010. That growth represented an increase of more than $33 million over 2009.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.