Birth of a Customer: How America’s food assistance grows into trade, industrial partnerships, and amazing new markets

[The following is based on a Digest exclusive interview with Michelle Bekkering, Acting Under Secretary for Trade Foreign Agricultural Affairs at the US Department of Agriculture].

In the bitter winters that followed the guns falling silent along the 38th Parallel, South Korea was not anyone’s idea of a commercial powerhouse. It was a shattered, mountainous peninsula of cratered rice paddies, charred hillsides, and barbed wire unspooling along a newly carved Demilitarized Zone. The country was exhausted, penniless, and desperately hungry.

America sent food.

Today, South Korea sends purchase orders. And increasingly, it sends advanced bioprocess technologies, industrial capital, and engineering partnerships that are creating entirely new markets for American agriculture. Somewhere between those emergency flour sacks of the 1950s and the high-tech trade delegations of today lies one of the most remarkable stories in American agricultural diplomacy. Michelle Bekkering, Acting Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, believes the lesson deserves a much larger audience.

In an interview with The Digest, Bekkering offered a striking historical comparison. Following the Korean War, the United States became South Korea’s primary lifeline. Over roughly fifteen years, America provided some $135 million in assistance, including food assistance.

“Fast forward now,” Bekkering said. “South Korea is one of our largest agricultural trading partners, and our trade with South Korea every year as a nation recoups that initial investment ten times over.”

Ten times. Every single year.

It isn’t a literal financial return; Korea’s extraordinary rise was forged through immense domestic grit, institutional discipline, and economic forces far beyond American assistance. But the magnitude of the transformation is undeniable, and Bekkering keeps another statistic close at hand: “If you look at the statistics right now of our top ten agricultural trading partners in the United States, eight of them are former recipients of U.S. aid.”

Eight out of ten.

“What does that show you?” she asked. “There is absolutely a correlation between the two.” While correlation alone cannot prove that emergency grain shipments caused later industrial miracles, it establishes the reality of a much longer economic timeline than the one usually told about foreign aid. Food assistance can be the opening chapter in a relationship that eventually blossoms into an industrial partnership of the first order. The recipient becomes a customer. The customer becomes an investor. The investor becomes a technology partner. And the technology partner helps create the next generation of customers.

Call it Giver’s Gain, at the scale of nations.

The Three Rungs of Prosperity

Bekkering grew up on a diversified family farm near Sanborn, Iowa, raising corn, soybeans, and hogs. She has spent much of her career at the intersection of international development, diplomacy, and commercial opportunity, and that background explains how she views USDA’s international food assistance programs. She calls them the “and-and programs.”

“Everything we do at USDA,” she explained, “is about our stakeholders.” Those stakeholders, she continued, are American farmers, ranchers, and producers. But USDA’s mission serves another purpose as well. “We’re feeding the world’s hungriest, and we’re doing it through U.S. commodities.” By serving both purposes, Bekkering explained, “we’re actually creating long-term relationships.”

USDA recently announced $825 million in international food assistance investments distributed across three distinct programs, each designed for a different developmental rung. Food for Peace addresses immediate crises, with its latest round supporting roughly 129,000 metric tons of American commodities for emergency operations in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti. McGovern-Dole Food for Education takes the generational view, funding school meals that support child nutrition, classroom attendance, and literacy across more than 6,400 schools in countries like Bolivia, Honduras, Cambodia, and Liberia. Meanwhile, Food for Progress works directly on the mechanics of agricultural economies, using commodity sales to fund value-chain modernization, trade infrastructure, and market development in countries including Bangladesh, Morocco, Thailand, and the Philippines.

These aren’t rigid stages that every nation follows in lockstep, but together they describe a coherent developmental arc: first help a population survive, then help the next generation learn and thrive, and finally build the market institutions and trade systems required to prosper.

Bekkering describes this as agriculture-led development: “We use the technology, we use the know-how of our agricultural community, and we work in those countries to help build up their systems.” The objective, she insists, is never perpetual dependency. “At the end of the day, our goal is while we are helping meet the needs of the hungry, we’re also helping those countries develop economies, market systems, trading systems, and eventually become our top trading partners.”

The ultimate measure of a food assistance program, in other words, is the day the recipient no longer needs it. And that is when the real commercial story begins.

A Korean Destroyer and an Iowa Connection

In the summer of 2016, I was aboard the South Korean guided-missile destroyer Sejong the Great, reporting during the Great Green Fleet activities associated with the RIMPAC naval exercises in the Pacific. The operation demonstrated that drop-in renewable fuels could power front-line American warships through demanding fleet maneuvers alongside an international coalition. I came away from the bridge with a challenge coin from the Republic of Korea Navy’s Maritime Task Squadron Seven—a prized souvenir from an extraordinary day.

There was an unmistakable symmetry in that moment: a nation that had once relied on emergency grain shipments to survive was now steaming alongside the United States Navy, demonstrating the naval capabilities of a high-tech democratic ally.

And the connections kept echoing back to the American heartland.

The warship was named for King Sejong, the 15th-century monarch celebrated for commissioning the Korean alphabet; back in Iowa City, the University of Iowa had established its own King Sejong Institute in 2014. Meanwhile, renewable fuels supplied by Dynamic Fuels had helped power the Navy’s original 2012 Great Green Fleet demonstration. The company was subsequently acquired by Ames-based Renewable Energy Group, where CEO Dan Oh helped lead the expansion from biodiesel into renewable diesel. REG would eventually be acquired by Chevron in 2022.

Warships, classrooms, renewable fuels, and Iowa soil. The relationship had traveled light-years from surplus grain shipments. That is how international partnerships develop: they acquire lives of their own, generating commercial currents no diplomat could have charted when the first food crates were unloaded at the docks of Busan.

A Trade Agreement Is Not a Purchase Order

Which brings us back to Bekkering and the immediate, practical work of selling American agricultural commodities overseas.

Consider ethanol. USDA’s American Biofuels Trade Outlook reports that the United States exported a record 2.2 billion gallons of ethanol in 2025, worth $4.7 billion. Bekkering noted that 2026 exports were tracking more than 20 percent ahead of that record pace. But the more compelling figure is the one on the immediate horizon. At a recent appearance in Iowa, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a bilateral framework with Mexico that Bekkering believes could represent a $1.5 billion ethanol export opportunity.

Moving from a high-level diplomatic announcement to actual unit trains of fuel rolling across the border requires an immense amount of roll-up-your-sleeves execution. A foreign government might agree in principle to higher blend rates, but the practical hurdles are daunting: How do you store large volumes of ethanol in tropical port facilities? What terminal modifications are needed? How do higher blends behave in older vehicle fleets?

Bekkering described Mexican energy officials and representatives of state oil company Pemex traveling to Houston for intensive technical sessions with USDA Foreign Agricultural Service personnel and the U.S. Grains Council. The work focused on storage protocols, terminal blending mechanics, and engine performance validation. It is the unglamorous, indispensable work of converting policy into plumbing, and plumbing into commerce.

Bekkering has a wonderfully succinct description of her agency’s role: “We’re your deal implementers,” she said. “A trade deal gets signed. It comes to me. It comes to the Foreign Ag Service. We’re the people who make those deals into actual sales.”

There may be no more important sentence in the interview for the future of the bioeconomy. Because there remains a vast difference between formulating a product and building a market. USDA says ethanol provisions have now been incorporated into ten recent reciprocal trade frameworks, including agreements with the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, and Ecuador. But an E10 policy doesn’t automatically load a railcar, a trade accord doesn’t guarantee a customer, and a breakthrough technology doesn’t generate demand on its own. Somebody has to build the commercial machinery.

The Korean Conglomerate, the Iowa Cornfield, and the California Lab

Now consider what has become of that original Korean agricultural relationship in our own backyard.

CJ BIO, part of South Korea’s CJ Group, operates a massive industrial fermentation complex in Fort Dodge, Iowa, producing bio-based amino acids from local grain. In 2024, CJ BIO teamed with Bay Area-based Lygos on plans to develop a commercial-scale biorefinery in Fort Dodge, combining Korean fermentation scale with American synthetic biology to pursue specialty biochemicals. And in October 2026, CJ CheilJedang and ADM announced a proposed joint venture combining CJ’s Fort Dodge infrastructure with ADM’s amino-acid manufacturing assets to anchor animal nutrition supply chains across the Americas.

Think about the arc of that history: a company from an industrial economy that once depended on American food relief is now bringing fermentation technology, industrial assets, and global commercial relationships into partnerships with American agricultural processors. The customer became an investor, and the investor became a technology co-developer.

A parallel story is unfolding in Clinton, Iowa, where ADM is partnering with The EVERY Company, the Bay Area precision fermentation pioneer developing animal-free egg proteins. For an emerging biotechnology startup, partnering with an established agricultural processor is transformational. Instead of having to create an entire industrial fermentation infrastructure on its own, the innovator gains access to ADM’s manufacturing capabilities, agricultural sourcing network, and decades of experience running large-scale biological processes.

There is deep synthetic biology in this story, but beneath the gene-editing and stainless-steel fermenters lies an immense volume of Midwestern corn.

The potential scale is staggering. The National Corn Growers Association, through its “Consider Corn” innovation initiatives, has been working aggressively to cultivate non-food, non-fuel industrial demand. Its demand analysis offers a startling benchmark: replacing petroleum-derived inputs in just ten percent of the world’s plastics with corn feedstocks represents 6.6 billion bushels of new annual demand.

Not 6.6 million. Billion.

For perspective, American growers harvested roughly 17 billion bushels in 2025. While that 6.6-billion-bushel figure represents an estimate of total addressable market rather than a short-term sales forecast, it illustrates the scale of the transition ahead. For generations, we have viewed corn as something to eat, feed to cattle, or distill into motor fuel. Tomorrow, it is an industrial building block for materials, polymers, and performance proteins that haven’t even been invented yet—and many of the buyers will be overseas.

The Next Great Exporter Is Still in the Lab

That brings us to the final challenge I put to Bekkering. It is easy to see how multinational giants like ADM or Bunge find foreign customers; they have trading desks in Geneva, logistics hubs in Singapore, and decades of institutional muscle. But what happens to the early-stage startup that has engineered a brilliant fermentation process or a novel biopolymer, yet possesses zero international marketing presence?

Bekkering recognized the dilemma instantly. “I do think there is this misnomer,” she said, “that when you think of USDA, when you think of export markets, we’re thinking of all the big guys.” While USDA certainly values its major grain handlers, she insisted the broader mission requires a wider net. “If our mission is to decrease our current agricultural trade deficit, that’s going to take big deals, but it’s going to take a lot of small deals too.”

Here Bekkering pointed to Foreign Agricultural Service programs designed to help emerging businesses test international waters before committing massive capital. Under the Quality Samples Program, USDA can support the delivery of qualifying U.S. agricultural commodity samples to prospective overseas buyers, allowing them to evaluate products and their commercial potential without placing the full cost of market exploration on the exporter. Similarly, USDA’s Export Credit Guarantee Program (GSM-102) provides guarantees for eligible financing of U.S. agricultural exports, helping mitigate certain foreign payment risks in developing markets.

These are not open-ended subsidies—they require qualifying products, applicants, and transactions under program rules. But the takeaway from Bekkering is clear: FAS is not solely an agency for companies that already know how to export. It can also help emerging businesses learn how to compete abroad. Because an invention that cannot find a customer remains an expensive lab experiment, while a technology that finds a customer becomes an industry.

The Harvest That Keeps Growing

Seventy years ago, American freighters carried grain to feed a devastated South Korea. Today, that relationship spans multi-billion-dollar agricultural trade, joint naval operations, cultural exchange, and Korean conglomerates building state-of-the-art biorefineries in the heart of Iowa.

In Iowa, stainless-steel fermenters are converting corn sugar into specialty chemicals and animal-free proteins. In California, biomanufacturing startups are inventing materials that scarcely existed a generation ago. In Houston, USDA specialists are working with Mexican officials to turn ethanol trade policies into functional terminal racks. And in developing nations across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, American agricultural commodities are keeping children in school and helping emerging economies build their own agricultural systems.

These are chapters in a much larger narrative about what enduring international partnerships can become. The first chapter was emergency relief. The next was agricultural commerce. Then came industrial investment, cultural exchange, defense partnerships, and technological collaboration. And now, companies whose origins lie in South Korea are helping develop the next generation of American biomanufacturing.

The remarkable thing is that each chapter creates the possibility of another. The relationship is no longer measured by what one country gives the other, but by what they have become capable of building together.

There is something almost parental about the arc. The goal of raising a child is never to keep them dependent; it is to nurture them until they are strong enough to make an enduring contribution of their own. The remarkable truth of international development is that the relationship does not fade as dependence ends—it deepens.

Call it Giver’s Gain, at the scale of nations. The most valuable agricultural customer of 2050 may not be buying an ounce of grain from us today. That customer might be an alternative protein startup just getting off the ground in the Bay Area, an emerging industrial processor in Southeast Asia, or a child sitting down to a hot, American-supported school meal in West Africa this morning.

We cannot foresee every partnership that will emerge over the next fifty years. But Michelle Bekkering has a magnificent example of how one of them grew up.

Ask South Korea. The account is still growing.

Category: Food & Agriculture, Top Stories