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Are You Ready to Export? Meet the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service
August 28 @ 10:00 am – 11:00 pm PDT
Are You Ready to Export?
Join us this week for a conversation with Jeff Albanese of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s Export Guarantee Program. Jeff Albanese is an International Trade Specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). Mr. Albanese overseas the Latin America portfolio for the Export Credit Guarantee Program (GSM-102) and Facility Guarantee Program (FGP) in the Credit Programs Division. Mr. Albanese joined FAS in 2010. He is a former career Foreign Service Officer with assignments in Afghanistan, Philippines, and Switzerland.
The GSM-102 program 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 Facility Guarantee Program (FGP) provides credit guarantees for infrastructure improvements in countries where demand for U.S. agricultural products may be limited by lack of adequate facilities.
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.