Upward, outward
Delta businesses seeing growth Guest writer
All signs are pointing upward and outward—upward in that America is seeing huge gains by small businesses in job creation and business growth, outward because a good portion of this growth is in exports. As American firms exported a record of $2.35 trillion of goods and services, these exports directly employed 11.3 million American workers—more than a million workers in Delta states.
President Barack Obama recently released these official export numbers in coordination with the announcement of next steps for the Made in Rural America initiative (MIRA). Over the next year, President Obama will lead our family of federal agencies in a number of actions to boost exports from our rural businesses by hosting a series of reverse trade missions and outreach events to connect rural businesses with foreign buyers, partners, and trade experts and creating a National Rural Export Innovation Team to increase the number of rural businesses that export, while educating potential exporters and local lenders on the necessary steps toward exporting and the federal resources available to them.
Additionally, MIRA will increase investments in rural infrastructure that are vital to manufacturing and exports, and directly promoting and investing in cultivating entrepreneurship and technology within rural communities.
The eight states in the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) have seen marked success in exports this past year: Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee each saw record levels of exports, and Louisiana remains sixth among all states. Our other four states also are seeing near-record export levels in recent years. These states, with only 3 percent of the U.S. population, in total exported $245 billion in goods last year—more than 10 percent of total U.S. exports. And $61 billion of those come from metropolitan areas within or just outside the DRA footprint.
All of this tells me that we—as federal, state, and local leadership in business/industry, work force and economic development, government—must double down on efforts to boost our region’s competitiveness and ability to provide for the global marketplace, and the Made in Rural America initiative does just that. The Delta Regional Authority is proud to be an active member of MIRA and ready to begin executing this plan to empower our region’s rural businesses to take a larger stake in the success of America’s export marketplace.
As part of the president’s initiatives, the DRA will help Delta businesses learn successful strategies for becoming export-ready and promote their products to the global marketplace. The DRA will hold capacity-building workshops in each of our eight states to prepare businesses for future exporting. The DRA will also work closely with its economic development partners and the private sector to recruit and ensure inclusion of rural businesses in future foreign trade shows and missions with a commitment to double this participation.
Most of this growth that we’re seeing across the region is, in fact, coming from small businesses. In each of the eight states within our footprint, more than 75 percent of companies exporting from that state are small or medium-sized businesses.
That is why we have also launched our own initiative to support entrepreneurs in the Delta and Alabama Black Belt by creating an entrepreneurial network that strengthens the local ecosystems throughout the Delta. The Delta Entrepreneurship Network seeks to identify, connect, nurture, and grow the region’s entrepreneurs and their ideas into these small and medium-sized exporters that are driving the region’s export success.
The opportunity is there for our region’s businesses to move upward and outward, but we must help them have the know-how, the resources, the confidence, and the infrastructure to achieve the success that we’re seeing across the country. The president is committed to growing products that can proudly say “Made in Rural America,” and as part of that commitment, the Delta Regional Authority is committed to helping our region’s businesses take their success upward and outward.
Chris Masingill is federal co-chairman of the Delta Regional Authority, a federal-state partnership congressionally mandated to help create jobs, build communities, and improve lives through strategic investments in economic development in the 252 counties and parishes of the Delta region.