USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) has operated MAP or a similar program for more than 50 years, a fact not justifying the status quo. This paragraph describing the MAP comes from USDA 2011 Budget Summary and Performance Plan.
“The budget provides funding of $160 million for the Market Access Program (MAP). This program reimburses participating organizations for a portion of the cost of carrying out overseas
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USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) has operated MAP or a similar program for more than 50 years, a fact not justifying the status quo. This paragraph describing the MAP comes from USDA 2011 Budget Summary and Performance Plan.
“The budget provides funding of $160 million for the Market Access Program (MAP). This program reimburses participating organizations for a portion of the cost of carrying out overseas marketing and promotional activities, such as consumer promotions. MAP participants include nonprofit agricultural trade organizations, State-regional trade groups, cooperatives, and private companies that qualify as small businesses. Annual MAP funding has grown substantially since 2001, when the program level was $90 million. Although the 2011 MAP funding level is reduced from 2010, it still provides a program level that is nearly 80 percent above 2001, reflecting the recent strong expansion in programming.”
A reader immediately notices that this text highlights expenditures BUT not results for the taxpayers. Why? This program embodies the term “corporate welfare.” If Congress and USDA genuinely cared about helping to create export opportunities for U.S. agricultural exporters, these two entities would completely overhaul this sclerotic, non-transparent mechanism.
The current complicated system funnels Federal money to promote exports through a labyrinth of intermediaries. Honest conversation with FAS staff reveals that these organizations often view MAP funds as “their” money.
If Congress desires to fund agricultural export promotion, then the money should go directly to small and medium-sized enterprises. To achieve this objective, FAS should co-locate its staff administering MAP to the 111 domestic field offices of the Commerce Department’s U.S. Foreign Commercial Service (USFCS). These FAS marketing specialists and their Commerce colleagues would then directly assist small and medium-sized (SME) agricultural exporters with the taxpayers’ money.
The March 11, 2010 Executive Order creating the National Export Initiative (NEI) states, “Members of the Export Promotion Cabinet shall develop programs, in consultation with the TPCC, designed to enhance export assistance to SMEs, including programs that improve information and other technical assistance to first-time exporters and assist current exporters in identifying new export opportunities in international markets.”
To complement the efforts of FAS and USFCS marketing specialists, FAS should embrace the USFCS strategy of posting Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) in domestic field offices during their U.S. tours. Hence, USFCS does not maintain its FSOs in Washington to build bureaucratic empires but stations them where the SME taxpayers will receive a direct return on their investment of several hundred thousand dollars in these talented individuals. Collaborating with their marketing colleagues, the FSOs will directly share their overseas expertise with U.S. SME agricultural exporters.
This reform will yield at least six benefits.
1. USG export promotion efforts will emerge as a seamless tapestry to provide efficient service to U.S. companies in ALL industries. This reorganization of resources will significantly contribute to doubling the value of U.S. exports in five years.
2. Congress will receive verified “success stories” from across the 111 domestic USFCS field offices, because participating enterprises will have to share export sales data with a confidentiality clause in exchange for Government money.
3. The community of SME agricultural exporters will receive direct benefits from MAP.
4. To fulfill the mandate of the NEI, USDA and USFCS will directly measure the impact of MAP funds at individual small and medium-sized business. The current convoluted, non-transparent MAP mechanism renders such a metric impossible. Cost-benefit studies do not substitute for actual numbers from enterprises.
5. Accountability will vastly increase, because the current MAP system cannot even require beneficiaries to provide export values directly attributable to Federal money. By substantiating export sales, the improved system will generate far more reliable data.
6. Candid conversation with compliance officers indicates that so-called compliance reviews do not qualify as actual audits of groups receiving MAP money. Hence, existing rules create incentive for beneficiaries to “put their hands in the cookie jar.”
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