Sep 25, 2025NPC CEO hopeful new trade model can propel potatoes into new markets
As he prepared to leave for two days of trade talks in Japan, National Potato Council CEO Kam Quarles expressed optimism that a new USDA trade approach could help finally pry open the Japanese market to U.S. fresh potatoes.
Earlier this week, USDA announced a three-pronged plan to support American agricultural producers and exports, including a new trade mission model of reciprocal trade deals targeting countries with high-return, low-risk export prospects.
While Quarles said NPC hasn’t had any official conversations about the reciprocal trade model, he said efforts to fully open the Japanese market to fresh potato imports — ongoing for nearly three decades — ”would perfectly fit” that mold.
“For a country where you’re talking about high return, low risk, that checks all of those boxes,” Quarles told Spudman. “High return — (an estimated) $150 million a year in new U.S. ag exports just off that singular commodity. We would hope that would be part of the mix.”
Quarles, along with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Luke Lindberg and other industry officials, will be in Japan Oct. 2-3 as part of a trade mission rescheduled from July.
The visit comes in advance of the annual bilateral meetings between USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries (MAFF) in Washington state.
The U.S. has long sought fresh potato access to Japan, where it has exported chipping stock since 2006. Negotiations have bogged down over phytosanitary concerns raised by Japan that Quarles has repeatedly said are a delaying tactic to maintain tight control over its domestic potato market.
Trade moves
USDA also announced an early launch of $285 million in trade promotion funding in fiscal year 2026. A budget passed by Congress earlier this year allocated that annual amount beginning in 2027.
The department also said in the Sept. 23 release that it planned to “reinvigorate” the GSM-102 credit guarantee program. Authorized to offset $5.5 billion in market risk for purchasers of American commodities, the program has $2 billion in liabilities on its books, according to USDA.
“USDA will reinvigorate this program to ensure it is best aligned to facilitate American exports to new markets,” according to the release.
The program provides credit guarantees to encourage financing of commercial exports of U.S. agricultural products.
On Sept. 17, USDA awarded $8.3 million to help 11 recipients, including NPC, address trade barriers and expand international market access for U.S. specialty crops.
Quarles said the $650,000 NPC received would go toward ensuring continued full access to the $135 million Mexican market, which fully opened to U.S. potatoes in May 2022.
Though pleased with that funding, Quarles remained focused on action yet to be taken: According to reports from Reuters and other media outlets, USDA and Congress are mulling the possibility of economic aid for U.S. farmers amid growing concerns.
Bumper crops, labor shortages, rising interest rates leading to the Federal Reserve’s Sept. 24 quarter-percentage point cut, and tariffs affecting the prices and availability of crop inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides are all factors contributing to a building crisis.
U.S. farmers have missed out on billions in soybean sales to China amid stalled trade talks, while a recent USDA forecast of a record corn crop is worrying farmers already combating low prices and rising fertilizer and seed costs. Those are two of the major commodity crops promised price and income support in Title I of the 2018 Farm Bill.
“All of this is feeding into these challenging economic times,” Quarles said. “There’s a lot of pain to be distributed right now in the general farm economy across all of these various commodities, and we want to make sure that if a train starts to move for the program crops, there’s room on it for specialty crops — and certainly potatoes.”
— Melinda Waldrop, Managing Editor
