International Issues Create Questions For The Potato Industry

For the past eight plus weeks, much of the international focus and concern for the farming community has been on trade and tariffs. But, for potato growers there are other international concerns. Chris Voigt, Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission said over the past 2-3 years, China and India have become major players, and competitors with the United States when it comes to potato and French Fry production.

“They are really competing with us very strongly. Now, some of the quality is not quite as good as ours, so they're really kind of picking up a lot of that lower-tier business, maybe not quite so profitable as some of our higher-tier business, but they're still really making a dent," Voigt noted. "Because there are a lot of Southeast Asian markets that can really only afford kind of a lower end product. And so they're really taking that business away from us.”

Voigt said on top of the new, additional competition; American farmers have been struggling because of a lack of new free trade deals. He said the U.S. is good at growing and making food, and not trying to get those products to customers overseas hurts farmers in a variety of ways. He said decision makers in D.C. need to be smart when it comes to free trade agreements.

"There's so many people that just kind of a blanket policy. ‘No, no, no free trade agreements, we got to keep everything here in the U.S., we got to serve our own markets, you know, America first.’ And I get that, but yet let's be strategic about what we're doing here, because not only is trade important for economic and financial reasons, it's also good for political reasons," Voigt pointed out. "You know, we have actually lost our place in a lot of the Pacific Rim, and China has been able to come in there, not just with trade, but just the Geopresence.”

Voigt says the change in the potato industry in the past couple of years has been very dramatic.

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