11 



Mr. Penny. This may be — in setting goals, you suggest that 

 Under Secretary Moos has established a 50-percent increase in ag 

 exports by the year 2000 as a priority for the Department. Where 

 do we go in terms of the 1995 farm bill to facilitate that objective? 



Mr. Goldthwait. Well, we are only beginning our work on the 

 farm bill, and on an in-house basis. We will want of course to get 

 a lot of suggestions from this and other committees as well as from 

 our various program users and producers groups. But already we 

 have at least a few ideas, some of which I referred to earlier, in 

 terms of shall we say the gaps, the things that our programs are 

 not addressing today in terms of activities that we could undertake 

 to further support exports. 



Some of these areas are likely to be things that need legislative 

 action in the farm bill. Some of them may be things that we can 

 do on the basis of existing legislative authorities. But I think the 

 direction we are going is trying to look more comprehensively at 

 starting with the mission of export expansion and all the categories 

 of activities that we have that support that goal and try to think 

 about what we are doing well with current authorities and current 

 initiatives and what kinds of things we need to be doing in addition 

 to that. That is the general approach that we are starting with. 



Mr. Penny. You indicate that in order to, in your testimony, "In 

 order to achieve a 50-percent increase in agricultural exports, we 

 will need to return exports of bulk and intermediate products to 

 the roughly $30 billion level of 1989 and 1990." I mean, there cer- 

 tainly were factors that led to our loss of market since then. 



How realistic is it that we can return to that goal in the bulk 

 and intermediate categories? 



Mr. Goldthwait. There are, I think, some important factors as 

 we look ahead to the end of this decade that are probably going to 

 support a recovery of those bulk exports. First of all, I think that 

 some of the competitive features that are in the market today, par- 

 ticularly on the feed grains side, say Chinese corn exports, will be 

 considerably smaller by that time. I think if you look at some of 

 the traditional bulk markets, China, Russia, there could be some 

 recovery by that time. 



We are also looking at growth in demand for bulk commodities 

 in many of the other countries of Southeast Asia. At our morning 

 staff meeting yesterday we had the experience of having five of our 

 representatives from Southeast Asian countries who are here on 

 home leave go through what they saw as the opportunities in their 

 markets, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. 



And each of them indicated, first of all, just an overwhelming op- 

 portunity for the high value products, but also interestingly in each 

 of the cases they referred to opportunities for the recovery of 

 growth of bulk commodities as well. So I think that is a very key 

 area. 



Obviously, a lot of the achievement of that is going to also de- 

 pend on our own competitiveness and addressing some of those 

 other unfair trade practices that are still out there. And that is, 

 again, why I agree with one of the statements that Mr. 

 Mendelowitz made about the importance of continuing our trade 

 policy work on — a very much priority basis, too. I don't think that 

 is an impossible goal. 



