NEW YORK: Agriculture is directly responsible for nearly $1.5 billion of Riverside County’s economic activity, county supervisor John Benoit said at Wednesday’s county-hosted Exporting Agriculture International Trade Summit.
Much of that money comes from local consumers — but the county’s farms also trade with more than 50 countries, he said. And officials on Wednesday encouraged the region’s farmers to pursue more customers abroad.
“We’re going to be establishing the taste preferences of this emerging middle class” around the world, said Jeff Deiss, a regional export finance manager at the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Several speakers pointed to that “emerging middle class” as a boon for U.S. farmers. Andy Anderson, executive director of the Western U.S. Agricultural Trade Association (WUSATA), said those customers are drawn to U.S. products because of the country’s high safety standards. And as more people move to cities and work in offices and factories, the market for prepared food is growing.
Anderson’s organization placed around 1.8 billion people in that “global middle class” category in 2010. In 2020, they anticipate around 3.2 billion consumers in that category.
“Our rising middle class (in the U.S.) is not going to compete with that in any way,” Anderson said.
According to WUSATA, the top markets for U.S. processed foods in 2013 were Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Japan and China. The organization believes the global market for processed foods is as large as $2.6 trillion annually.
Anderson said processed foods — products like pre-cooked chicken, chopped nuts and dried or canned fruits — create additional jobs in manufacturing and packaging in the U.S., too.
Glenda Humiston, vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the University of California, said that by UC’s calculations, around 1.2 million California jobs are tied to natural resources — including agriculture along with fishing, mining, recreation and renewable energy. In the next five years, she believes that workforce will grow by nearly 300,000 people.
But, she cautioned, the pool of workers willing to take jobs in the fields are shrinking. Her department’s research has found that young people in Mexico and central America, who comprise much of the migrant labor force in the U.S., are increasingly able to find better paying, less taxing jobs elsewhere.
“There’s going to be massive upheavals in the system,” Humiston said.
