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 FAS Mission 

 Richard Krajock 

 November 10. 1993 



Tools to Identify New Markets 



The Council is very supportive of the efforts by FAS to identify new markets for 

 U.S. agricultural commodities. We believe one of the strengths of the cooperator 

 program has been the relationship between the participants and FAS. Due to the 

 size and strength of the Council's overseas operations, our relationship with FAS 

 is certainly different from those Cooperators that are smaller and do not 

 maintain overseas offices and staff. In countries where the Council has offices 

 we are able to provide FAS with assistance in completing its mission, while in 

 countries were the Council does not have an office, FAS plays a critical role in 

 our own market developcoent activities. 



The value of our relationship with FAS is that our staff is able to work with FAS 

 both here and abroad to develop market Information and goals, to broaden the 

 range of contacts that FAS would be unable to maintain on their own and to share 

 in the burden of U.S. company visitors and information demands. In this 

 relationship we all benefit. We get the image of support of the U.S. government 

 in countries where that makes our organization "legitimate" plus the support of 

 FAS personnel. We in turn provide FAS with information, contacts, and services 

 that help the foreign missions meet a wider variety of demands. 



However, in those countries where the Council does not have offices or regular 

 contacts, FAS has provided an invaluable service. Two examples are: 



1) In the mid-1980 's FAS helped the Council in establishing contacts and 

 becoming familiar with the grains and livestock markets in the Soviet Union. 

 Because of that initial assistance the Council is now able to operate 

 independently with Russia euid the republics of the Former Soviet Union. 



2) When the Council began a major program in Algeria we were unaware of the 

 political environment that we were entering. The Agricultural Attache was able 

 to provide us with the diplomatic and political background necesseiry to establish 

 our contacts and complete the project. 



Additionally, FAS identifies trade barriers to US feed grain imports and then 

 works through both their Washington and overseas offices to remove those 

 barriers. FAS and the Council have worked together on countless occasions in 

 preparing documentation for U.S. Trade Representative use in both bilateral and 

 multilateral negotiations. This is a valuable service with the goal of 

 eliminating trade barriers that deny or limit the importation of feed grains from 

 the United States. The coordination and cooperation between the Council and FAS 

 in the area of trade policy has increased our access to the Japanese industrial 

 grain markets, compensated U.S. farmers for the loss of access to the Spanish and 

 Portuguese markets and preserved our trading rights for com gluten feed in the 

 European Community. 



While FAS has its own long-range planning capabilities, the Council supplements 

 those efforts by producing a world FEED GRAIN daaand model that projects supply 

 and demand for feed grains into the next decade. I am including a copy of the 

 1993 report with my testimony. Additionally, through our network of overseas 

 offices, the Council is able to identify short-term market trends and make 

 recommendations for programs to take advantage of these changes to both the FAS 

 overseas and Washington staffs. 



