FOCUS
The return on investment
throughout the government to
spend money wisely and to be careful with resources.” But at the same
time Hale doesn’t see a lot of waste
in the Foreign Agricultural Service
budget. Zarit feels similarly. “
Everything that we are doing is important
for our mission,” he says, adding that the Commercial
Service has become one of the most efficient agencies in
government and its officers are “excellent stewards of the
taxpayers’ dollar.”
One point that’s often missed, Zarit says, is how important commercial officers are to small businesses. It’s
easy to dismiss their work, FCS members say, when the
perception is that all they do is help major U.S. companies
that have the resources on their own to work with foreign
governments and expand their exports.
come and spend the time that it
takes.”
Hale notes that her agency’s recent reorganization was aimed
specifically at combating such non-tariff trade barriers. The new Office of Scientific and Technical
Affairs works to break down rules made by foreign governments that impede trade. Tough for huge companies
to deal with, she says, those hurdles are impossible for
small ones to negotiate.
is estimated at $400 for every
$1 the taxpayer invests.
Advantages for Small Businesses
FCS officer Nicholas Kuchova is a perfect example of
a small businessman who benefited from the Commercial Service’s assistance. In the 1980s, before joining the
Foreign Service, he invested in a homebuilding venture in
Japan. He came to Tokyo with a U.S. crew to train them
on the company’s building techniques, only to learn that
Japanese import officials were refusing to release the
company’s supplies.
Stuck paying for his crew while they could not work,
Kuchova turned to the Commercial Service. A locally employed staffer went to bat on his behalf, and the supplies
were released. “I thought that was the coolest thing ever,”
he recalls. Years later, Kuchova saw an advertisement for
a commercial officer and applied. He’s been working on
behalf of similar small and medium-size companies ever
since.
In the same way, Foreign Agricultural Service officers
say that in many of the countries in which they work small
businesses could never navigate the hurdles to a successful export business without government help. “When
times get tough in the United States, more people look to
export,” says an FAS officer in South America. “We help
people to bring products into a market that is very bureaucratic and difficult to get into, and presents lots of red
tape for the would-be exporter. It’s so bad that when times
are good in the United States, they might just say ‘I’m not
interested’; but in times like these, when people don’t have
sales options back home, they are a lot more willing to
The Diplomatic Dividend
At the same time, commercial and agricultural trade
between countries is one of the most effective forms of
diplomacy. “We are very people-to-people. When you
get businesspeople talking and doing business, there is a
dividend that is hard to quantify in terms of improving the
relationship,” Kuchova says.
The effectiveness of trade in overcoming political conflict hit home for Stephen Anderson, a longtime commercial officer, when he was stationed in China. During
his second month there, in May 1999, North Atlantic
Treaty Organization forces accidently dropped a bomb on
the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three diplomats.
The U.S. embassy in Beijing was the target of demonstrators for a week. Returning to his office, Anderson
found a paving stone on his chair that had been thrown
through the window — and wondered how he could ever
promote U.S. exports in such an environment.
But within a month, he was helping U.S. companies
sell services to Chinese companies coping with the impending Y2K transition. Thanks at least in part to those
efforts, China — and the rest of the world — averted the
computer glitch. “I was hooked,” Anderson says. “It
demonstrated to me that the business relationship is the
foundation for peace. I became fully engaged with commercial diplomacy because, to me, that was a concrete example of how the job could overcome incredible conflict.”
Like the State Department, both FCS and FAS pursued the “transformational diplomacy” initiative of former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, moving officers
from developed countries in Europe to the developing
ones of Asia and Africa. They also have officers in countries vital to U.S. security interests, including Iraq and
Afghanistan.
One Commercial Service officer who served in Bagh-
