40 JUNE 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL As a nation, who do we call on to protect and expand American agricultural exports? To break down foreign protectionist barriers? To ensure American farms are economically sustainable for the next generation to inherit? The answer is the roughly 1,000 men and women of the Foreign Agricultural Service—including 150 Foreign Service officers working in U.S. embassies and consulates around the world—who make the world safe for U.S. agricultural exports every day. Barriers to Trade American agricultural exports are the lifeblood of the Foreign Agricultural Service. FAS employees get up every day to keep U.S. agricultural products flowing into foreign markets. And we play what feels like a never-ending game of whack-amole, knocking down barriers to U.S. exports in one market only to have more barriers pop up in other markets. Trade policy is generally considered complex, but modern agricultural trade policy would shame Byzantium. On top of basic tariffs, tariff-related measures like tariff-rate quotas and special safeguard measures can trigger market-halting tariffs if exports exceed a certain volume or value threshold. Foreign markets also layer on so-called technical barriers to trade, like restrictions on container sizes or labeling requirements. And on top of those, trade partners apply sanitary (animal) and phytosanitary (plant) barriers to trade, some of which are scientifically reasonable (e.g., no importing pork from a country with African swine fever) and some of which are just gross protectionism in disguise (e.g., setting a “zero tolerance” for Salmonella in raw pork, when no one eats raw pork). With all these overlapping layers of foreign market protectionism, it is both a wonder and a testament to FAS diplomatic skill that U.S. agricultural exports reached $176 billion in 2024. Market Access and More FAS Foreign Service officers are diplomats by profession and often economists by training, but some agricultural trade barriers are so absurd they can test the limits of our composure. Take, for example, the Canadian supply management system. This Canadian social contract severely limits imports of U.S. The author (left) with Iowa pork exporters at the FOODEX trade show in Tokyo, 2017. Japan was the United States’ number one pork export market by value in 2017. COURTESY OF EVAN MANGINO
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