Council Seeks Export Outlets for "Made by American Indians" Products

By Linda Habenstreit

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Market Access Program (MAP) has provided the means for many producers, exporters, private companies and trade organizations to begin or expand sales of U.S. agricultural, fish or forest products in overseas markets. MAP helped sustain sales of agricultural exports, even as last year’s worldwide economic crisis adversely affected the U.S. farm economy.

Last year, a new participant joined the MAP – the Intertribal Agriculture Council and its cooperating organization National Tribal Development Association. AgExporter talked with the Executive Director of the Council, Greg Smitman, about the organization’s goals and how the MAP program is helping achieve those goals.

AgExporter: What is the Intertribal Agriculture Council and what is its purpose?

Smitman: We’re a network of 87 Native American tribes that was formed in 1987. The Council is owned by tribal governments and run by a 12-member board of directors – one from each Native American region in the lower 48 states and Alaska. The tribes in each region elect the board. The purpose of the Council is to promote change in Native American agriculture.

AgExporter: How are you accomplishing this goal?

Smitman: After the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990 provided Native Americans with access to USDA programs, we took a close look at all our options. We determined that the Foreign Agricultural Service’s (FAS) programs would help us solve some of the social and economic development problems Native Americans face. We realized that FAS programs like the MAP would help the Council take high-end, specialty Native American agricultural products out of the local community and into overseas markets.

Although Native American tribes got access to USDA programs in 1990, the Council thought it needed to accomplish a few key goals before it would be ready to participate in the MAP. We needed to identify our products, create enough volume to be able to routinely fill orders and build the business structures necessary to work in international markets.

To identify our products, we applied for a trademark with the U.S. Patent Office. In 1995, the "Made by American Indians" trademark was registered to the Intertribal Agriculture Council. We license it free of charge to tribal members and tribes across the country. Now we have a clear identifier of Native American products – not imitations, the real thing.

To create volume, we began establishing enterprises and cooperatives with tribes and individual Native Americans. We had to ensure that when foreign buyers purchase Native American products they have some assurance that this is not a one-shot deal and that the products can be supplied over and over again.

The final piece to the puzzle – building business structures – has been more difficult. We are still not completely comfortable in this area, but we are working on it. Our goal is for each Native American cooperative or individual enterprise to have the internal structures necessary to develop, produce and market a particular product for the international marketplace.

We started working on these items in 1990 and got to the point where we thought we had done enough leg work to apply for participation in the MAP in 1997. We received our first allocation of MAP funding in 1998. This past June, the Council received a 1999 MAP allocation of $349,940.

AgExporter: It sounds like the Council had a very purposeful, structured approach toward achieving its goals. What types of Native American specialty products do you promote?

Smitman: We market Native American agricultural and food products grown in the traditional Native American way by the people who originated them. We consider our products to be high-end, premium products that are worth a little more and cost a little more. We market some commodities, but mostly we sell food products.

We used our 1998 MAP allocation to hold export readiness seminars for tribal cooperatives and rent USDA-sponsored booths at SIAL ‘98 in Paris, France, Foodex ‘99 in Tokyo, Japan, and the Food Marketing Institute’s U.S. Food Export Showcase in Chicago, Ill.

The Council promoted a whole range of Native American agricultural products at these trade shows. For example, the Gila River Tribe’s Gila River Farms enterprise in Arizona displayed what I consider to be the world’s sweetest tangelos and other citrus products, and the only virgin olive oil produced in Arizona. Quinault Pride Enterprises, which represents the Quinault Tribe of Washington, exhibited smoked, canned and other further-processed salmon, bottom fish, black cod and shellfish. The I’TCHIK (meaning "good" in Crow) Herbal Tea Company on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana displayed its herbal teas. The Yakima Indian Nation’s Yakima Land Enterprises in Washington displayed apples. The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., brought its "Swamp Spice Seasoning" mix and ruby red grapefruit. Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI), representing the Navajo Nation of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, exhibited pelletized alfalfa and pinto beans.

But the list of products produced by Native American tribes does not stop there. With about 48 million acres of Native American land used for either cultivation or grazing, we will have a vast diversity of agricultural products to promote when each tribe is ready to do so.

For example, around the Great Lakes the Chippewa Tribes grow real wild rice – a high-end, specialty gourmet product, not brown paddy rice. The Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin produces traditional white corn – the extremely sweet corn used for soups. The tribes in New England harvest quite a lot of berries. They have both blueberry and cranberry bogs, as do the Chippewa Tribes.

In Florida, home to the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes, sugar cane is popular, as well as row and vegetable crops. The Seminoles have a highly diversified farming operation with the 13^th largest cattle herd in the nation. They also produce lemons – in fact, they are the largest producer of lemons on the East Coast.

Another big concentration of Native Americans lives in Oklahoma, where vegetables, cattle and mainstream commodity crops like grains and soybeans are raised.

In New Mexico, the Pueblo Tribes still maintain the traditional Native American lifestyle. In addition to weaving cotton, they acquired skill in working with wool 400 years ago after the Spanish introduced sheep and goats to the region.

The tribes of Arizona have highly commercial, irrigated crop land where fruit orchards, row and vegetable crops and cotton are grown. NAPI uses about 110,000 acres on the Navajo Nation’s land to grow crops, Gila River Farms uses about 35,000 acres on the Gila River Tribe’s reservation and the Ak-Chin tribal enterprise farms about 14,000 acres on the Ak-Chin Tribe’s land. The Gila River Farms enterprise uses its irrigation waste water to raise a type of farm-raised fish called tilapia for the local fresh fish market.

Moving to the Northwest, the Yakima Valley, named after the Yakima Indian Nation, is world-famous for its apple orchards. On the Washington-Oregon coast, the fishery tribes raise salmon, geoducks (a large edible clam), clams, oysters and crabs.

The tribes of Montana and the Dakotas mainly produce cattle and grains. Although the climate does not encourage much else, they’ve come out with value-added products like herbal teas and jams and jellies.

Some tribes have already begun exporting their products overseas on their own. For example, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., sells turtles to Japan, Gila River Farms is exporting specialty wheat for pasta to Italy, NAPI sends alfalfa pellets to Mexico, Yakama Land Enterprises ships apples to Mexico and the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s enterprise is exporting geoducks to China.

AgExporter: Wow! That’s quite a diversity of agricultural products. How did the Council do at the trade shows?

Smitman: For the first time out of the box, I think we did very well. Our purpose was to find out what the markets are like so we can determine which tribes and which products are best suited to individual markets and then further tailor our products to those markets at future shows.

Although we have just gotten started in the export business, we think we can achieve our financial objectives more rapidly in the international marketplace.

Already we have found export markets infinitely more accessible to Native American products than the U.S. domestic market. Foreign buyers are interested in these products not only because they are naturally grown, but because they are produced by Native Americans. This is especially true in Germany where the interest in Native Americans is enormous – some people there hold pow-wows where they dress in feathers and dance.

Export markets also have price advantages. In the United States, some consumers expect to find Native American products, like pecans for example, selling for $1 a pound at roadside stands. But when we properly package, label and market these same products in overseas markets as high-end specialty products, we can significantly increase our income.

Better profits translate into employment on Indian reservations. As tribal cooperatives, enterprises and individuals hire more Native Americans to produce, process, package and position their products, employment and income increase. This in turn will help solve some of the social and economic development problems we see too often on Native American reservations. And that’s our overarching goal.

Our plan is to work with several tribes or individuals at a time and educate them through export readiness seminars and international trade shows. The seminars help them identify which products are most appropriate for the export market and which countries would be most likely to purchase their products.

After a year or two, these enterprises will graduate from our program and display their agricultural products at their own USDA-sponsored booths. Then we will bring in new tribal enterprises, cooperatives and individuals and start the cycle again. We have a vision that, in a couple of years, we might have from 10 to 20 Native American booths at these food shows. Eventually…Well, why not a whole Native American pavilion?

AgExporter: Would you say that MAP participation has helped the Council achieve its goals?

Smitman: Yes, beyond what we had anticipated. When we got started we had an idea of what we needed to do and thought that in a few years we might be able to make some sales. We have been overwhelmed by the amount of interest foreign buyers express in Native American products. We have had people at our booth constantly, three deep, day after day, negotiating sales. Why, in the first six months of participation in the MAP, we went so far as to exceed our third-year goal.

Native Americans return from international food shows with new outlets and broader horizons than they ever had before. They can talk realistically about changing, modifying and increasing development, production and marketing processes. We are already starting to see changes in business structures in some enterprises that we did not expect to see for two or three years. The changes are just starting to occur, but they’re already having a tremendously positive impact on our people.

AgExporter: What international trade shows are you planning to attend in the future?

Smitman: We are planning to go to ANUGA ‘99 in Germany and Foodex 2000 in Japan. We will make a pre-ANUGA trip to Germany and conduct follow-up meetings in Switzerland. We are also planning sales missions to Sweden and Hong Kong to learn more about those markets. We think some specialty Native American crops would do well in China -- that’s why we are going to Hong Kong.

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For further information, contact the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Billings, Montana. Tel.: (406) 259-3525; Fax: (406) 256-9980.

Native Americans: The First Farmers

Between one-half and three-fifths of all the world’s crops now in cultivation were first domesticated by Native Americans. Until Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, Europeans had never tasted avocados, beans (lima, kidney, pea, shell, string and others), cacao (for chocolate), cassava, chicle (for chewing gum), chilies, corn, hickory nuts, jicama, maple syrup, manioc, papayas, peanuts, pecans, peppers, persimmons, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, sunflower seeds, sweet potatoes, tapioca, tomatoes or vanilla. Nor had they worn clothes woven from long-fiber cotton. In all, Native Americans have contributed more than 300 food crops to the world.

Native Americans in the central Mexican state of Puebla began collecting and domesticating wild plants about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. By about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago about 10 percent of their food came from cultivated products; by about 5,400 years ago the amount ratcheted up to some 30 percent. Archaeological evidence indicates that by 5000 B.C., Native Americans began farming using indigenous agricultural practices as well as those learned from Mexican and Central American cultures.

Native Americans were geneticists of a sort– through hybridization they developed a new type of corn, which provided the subsistence basis for southwestern Indian civilization. They learned that by planting corn, beans and squash together (the "three sisters") they could reduce plant loss to insects. Today agronomists use this ancient technique to grow crops without depleting the soil or overusing pesticides.

Native Americans developed water conservation practices and used several methods of irrigation – one of which is still in use today in some parts of Phoenix, Ariz. They also domesticated alpaca, dogs, ducks, guineas pigs, honey bees, llama, turkeys and vicuña.

Today corn and potatoes are among the most important crops in the world. Not far behind in importance are manioc, which has become a staple in parts of Africa, and the American sweet potato. For all their agricultural achievements, the world owes a debt of gratitude to Native Americans.

How One Tribe Started Exporting Its Product

More than a year ago the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe of Sequim, Washington, entered the export market with more than eight other local tribes. Their product? Live geoduck (pronounced goo-ee-duhk), a very large edible clam found in the Pacific Northwest. Their export market? Asia, primarily Shanghai and Guangzhou, China, but occasionally Japan and Korea as well, all places where geoduck is considered a delicacy.

Geoduck is the tribe’s premier product, but their company, Jamestown Seafood, which the tribe has owned and operated for nine years, also markets live oysters and dungeness crab.

The geoduck holds some distinctive records. It is the largest intertidal, burrowing clam in the world and also one of the longest living. Geoducks have been found that are older than 140 years and weigh more than 10 pounds.

According to John Robben, President of Jamestown Seafood, "We had been exporting geoducks indirectly through another company for several years. Then two years ago we went to the International Seafood Exhibition in Dalian, China, for the first time. We made some contacts there and returned to the exhibition last year. In January 1998 we began exporting geoducks to China ourselves." Last year Jamestown Seafood exported 100,000 pounds of geoducks to Asia valued at $600,000, about one-half the value of total geoduck sales worldwide.

"The logistics of shipping a live product to China are quite demanding," said Robben. "Divers harvest the geoducks early in the morning from Dungeness Bay. The geoducks are immediately brought to the packing plant where they are weighed, sorted, packed in Styrofoam boxes with gel ice, and delivered to the airport. By 5 a.m. the next morning, they are on their way to China and arrive 12-14 hours later, if we can get a direct flight. The next morning they are picked up at the airport and taken to market."

Once geoducks are harvested, they have a five- to seven-day life span, making it very important that they arrive in the display case at their destination no more than 72 hours after they have been removed from the water. Other challenges include language barriers, supply, shipping costs and pricing.

"Our greatest concern is depleting the supply of geoducks. We want to develop an ongoing relationship with other tribes so we can take a regional approach to geoduck sales and ensure that no one tribe runs out," said Robben. "Having a consistently high volume of geoduck sales would also allow foreign buyers to obtain volume discounts and consolidate air freight."

"Pricing is another concern. If we had an independent representative in China keeping track of supply and demand, we would know what the going price for geoduck is during a given week."

In the meantime, Jamestown Seafood is continuing to seek additional export sales in China. The tribe is planning to go on a sales mission to Hong Kong with the Intertribal Agriculture Council.

Last modified: Thursday, October 14, 2004 PM