Reaching Out
Lynn Hannah still has the antiquated telex machine she once used to monitor her company’s first shipments of spinach to Japan in the early 1970s, even though her family-run company, Pacific Valley Foods, long ago entered the computer age and now exports 90 percent of its food products to just about every corner of the globe. With its most recent ventures—sending Washington-grown berries to India and corn to Pakistan—the Bellevue firm could very well be the poster child for an unprecedented campaign under way to bulk up the nation’s foreign trade muscle.
President Barack Obama’s National Export Initiative aims to double United States exports by 2015. An offshoot of that is Gov. Chris Gregoire’s initiative to boost foreign trade in Washington by 30 percent during the next four years. Both are counting on an export boom to help lift the country from financial crisis and ensure a long-term, healthy recovery in the process. “I view trade as the ticket out of the recession for Washington state,’’ Gregoire says.
While Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft are the engines running Washington’s economy, small and medium-sized enterprises such as Hannah’s eight-person food company are providing the fuel. More than 90 percent of Washington’s 8,500 companies that export products worldwide are businesses with fewer than 500 employees. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses generated one-fifth of Washington’s $46.6 billion in exports in 2010—helping make the state the fourth-largest exporter in the U.S., and third-largest in agriculture. Among the 50 states, Washington realized the second-highest dollar growth in exports between 2005 and 2009, with exports increasing by $18.7 billion.
New exporting strategies are being carried out by dozens of government-sponsored agencies, and have turned state and federal trade experts into matchmakers, hand-holders and support group leaders. They help businesses, particularly small and medium-sized companies, locate, set up shop and win new markets overseas by providing export financing, counseling on foreign markets, lobbying expertise to overcome trade barriers and funding for new export-promotion programs. Government agencies also enlist the private sector’s help and create partnerships to help facilitate exporting.
Recent initiatives to boost trade include the awarding of $3 million by Washington’s Community Economic Revitalization Board to six programs statewide that help companies enter new markets or engage in exporting for the first time, and the dispatching of Washington’s largest trade delegation ever to China and Vietnam in September.
Since President Obama announced his export initiative in January 2010—and
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