International Trade

Agricultural Trade Offices' Role in Promoting U.S. Exports Is Unclear Gao ID: NSIAD-92-65 January 16, 1992

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service runs a network of 13 agricultural trade offices worldwide at an annual cost of $4.7 million. Congress has authorized USDA to open up to 25 trade offices to place more emphasis on market development overseas. This report (1) determines the kinds of activities performed by these offices, (2) assesses the criteria used to select sites, (3) evaluates how well agricultural trade offices are carrying out their market development mission, and (4) identifies needed operational and management improvements.

GAO found that: (1) ATO activities were generally consistent with the type of market development activities specified in their authorizing legislation and included supervising cooperator activities, providing trade assistance services, and supporting export assistance programs; (2) trade offices generally devote more of their total time to market development activities than agricultural attache posts, which generally carry out the same types of activities; (3) 6 of the 13 ATO serve as USDA representatives and function as de facto attache posts and assume responsibility for such traditional attache activities as commodity reporting and trade policy work; (4) since 1978, USDA has opened trade offices without consistently using specific site selection criteria; (5) it was unable to assess the overall effectiveness of ATO, because USDA has not devised a long-range market development strategy or established benchmarks by which to gauge ATO effectiveness; (6) USDA lacks an overall vision of how ATO can enhance agricultural competitiveness and has made little effort to evaluate how well ATO carry out their mission; and (7) personnel quality is an important factor in determining ATO effectiveness, but USDA does not have a curriculum devoted to market development or provide opportunities for trade office directors to share marketing ideas.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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