By RACHEL LANE

D.C. Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While tensions remain high between the U.S. and Chinese governments, businesspeople on both sides of the Pacific expect and hope trade continues as usual.

The USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) has organized many trade trips in the eight months since Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Ted McKinney took the position. The trip from May 21-25 was the first trade trek to China, and 26 U.S. companies sent representatives to participate.

Each trip is organized to allow the representatives of the U.S. businesses to meet with as many of the Chinese businesspeople as possible during travel.

Doug Newcom, vice president of Global Tech Services at the National Swine Registry (NSR), based in Indiana, travels to China four or five times a year. On this trip, there was no increased tension between him and the people he regularly does business with in China.

He doesn’t think the trade imbalance will ever disappear because China doesn’t buy the value of products the United States buys from China, but he hopes to see some restrictions ease.

China is the largest market for NSR members. One member has a shipment of 1,000 pigs going there this week; that is about half of the annual average of purebred pigs sent to China. Newcom said some years, no pigs have been shipped there.

“We tell our members, don’t rely on export markets for their income … Borders can always be closed,” Newcom explained.

Instead, members of the NSR have other farm products – often crossbred pigs – they sell for daily bills, while when the exported purebred pigs are sold, the money is used for a one-time purchase, like a new piece of equipment.

For members, there are complications to doing business with China, the biggest being the health testing protocols it has in place, Newcom said. The tests are based on veterinary medicine from 20 or 30 years ago that labs in the United States don’t run any longer.

When the Chinese government runs the tests, it charges almost double what it charges Canadian pork producers, even though some of the Canadian pork goes to Seattle before being shipped to China.

When it comes to intellectual property theft, Newcom said NSR is not concerned. The Chinese can take the genes of the pigs, but the genetic program the NSR has in place is the value – taking the genes of the current pig wouldn’t help them determine the next steps the NSR breeders are taking.

He said this trade trip has been beneficial. His first trade trip with the FAS was to India in the fall of 2017, which was McKinney’s first trade trip, as well. “I can’t believe more businesses don’t do this,” Newcom said.

On both trips, he was able to meet with a dozen business representatives within a few days. If he made the trip alone, it would have taken him three weeks to meet the same number of people. Each meeting would have lasted several hours and would have been an hour’s travel from one other.

These trips bring the businesspeople from China to one or two cities with the expectation of shorter meetings, maybe of 45 minutes.

He said the next trip, to Japan, would be beneficial to a couple of his members, but he doesn’t think anyone plans to attend. He doesn’t think the Indonesia trip that is scheduled will provide a big enough market to justify the trip. But he plans to participate on a trip to southern Africa. It’s a market that is not open to his members, and has potential to be a large market.

“Our goal is to increase business in existing markets … We’d never done anything in India. The worst thing we thought would happen would there wouldn’t be a market,” Newcom said.

As it is, most of the meetings he attended were not productive for business, but three were, and he remains in contact with those representatives.

During a phone conference with reporters last week, McKinney said he remains cautiously optimistic about trade with China. The meeting May 14 between Chinese and U.S. trade officials seemed to go well, from what he heard, but nothing specific was addressed based on specific commodities.

An advance team of U.S. trade experts may be in China as early as this week to try to discuss details about specific concerns on commodities and intellectual property, McKinney said.

He said planning for this trade mission started last October, when issues were brewing. The FAS decided to plan the trip and McKinney is glad it did because it’s been “a wildly successful visit.” At the Sial Food Show, the largest food innovation show in the Asia-Pacific area, many countries had displays. The U.S. pavilion was the largest because of the variety of products our nation can offer, McKinney said.

He met with master chefs, representatives for a soybean oil facility, representatives and officials of China, the European Union and U.S. trade groups.

On the first day of the trade mission, more than 100 Chinese buyers attended over 180 meetings with the U.S. businesspeople. Millions of dollars’ worth of business is expected as a direct result of these meetings.

“It was wonderful to see the receptivity of U.S. products,” McKinney said, adding that having a reputation for quality, safe products available in quantities to meet retailer needs remains a benefit for American producers.