Description

Are You Ready to Export?

Join us this week for a conversation with Maria Dorsett of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service's Export Guarantee Program. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Export Credit Guarantee Program (GSM-102) provides credit guarantees to encourage financing of commercial exports of U.S. agricultural commodities. By reducing financial risk to lenders, credit guarantees encourage exports to importers in countries—mainly developing countries—that have sufficient financial strength to have foreign exchange available for scheduled payments.

The GSM-102 program guarantees credit extended by the private financial sector in the United States (or, less commonly, by the U.S. exporter) to approved foreign financial institutions using dollar-denominated, irrevocable letters of credit for purchases of U.S. food and agricultural products by foreign importers. USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) administers the program on behalf of the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which issues the credit guarantees. GSM-102 covers credit terms of up to 18 months; maximum terms may vary by country. 

CCC guarantees payments due from approved foreign financial institutions to exporters or financial institutions in the United States. However, the financing must be obtained through normal commercial sources. Typically, 98 percent of principal and a portion of interest are covered by a guarantee. Any follow-on credit arrangements between the foreign financial institution and the importer are negotiated separately and are not covered by the CCC guarantee. The FAS website provides information on specific country and commodity allocations and other program information and requirements.

Wednesday Webinars

Wednesday Webinars with SBA Seattle is an ongoing series of free, virtual, webinars covering a variety of topics to benefit small business owners. On the fourth Wednesday of each month, we will be focusing on export assistance, featuring conversations with different members of the Washington Export Outreach Team (WEOT). Established in 2013 following a national mandate to do more to support international trade, WEOT is a collaborative team of local, state, regional, and federal export assistance agencies who provide you the tools and resources you need to sell internationally.

About the Host

John Brislin is SBA's International Trade & Finance Specialist (Export Finance Manager) for Washington State, Northern Idaho and Alaska. He has over 23 years of private-sector international banking and trade finance experience working at Bank of Boston (Bank of America) and Bank of California (U.S. Bank). John has over 12 years of public-sector export trade finance and risk mitigation experience working at Export Finance Assistance Center of Washington (EFACW), Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM Bank) and SBA Office of International Trade (SBA OIT). He looks forward to working with Small Businesses so they can turn their export opportunities into actual sales and to achieve the ultimate goal of getting paid—especially on time—for those sales.