The industry body said that volume was off 5 percent on a fresh weight equivalent (FWE) basis at 3,061,166 metric tons (67,529,326 hundredweight (cwt)). This is still the second-highest volume of potato exports ever for the U.S.

There were many external factors impacting the year-over-year decline; however, the most important were excess European supply and resulting low prices, the strong dollar and the slowdowns at US West Coast ports from October 2014 – February 2015. While frozen, fresh and seed exports were down, dehy and chip exports were actually up.

Fresh potatoes

The value of US exports of fresh potatoes (table-stock and chip-stock) declined by 12 percent to $183 million. The volume decline was only 7 percent to 407,159 MT (8,981,928 cwt) as unit values increased.

Canada remains far and away the largest market for fresh potatoes at 48 percent of the total. Therefore, the 18 percent reduction in shipments to Canada was the leading factor in the decline. In fact, good growth was made in shipments to other key markets. Much of the decline in shipments to Canada was caused by reductions in purchases of chipping potatoes for processing in Canada. The second largest market remains Mexico, which grew by 15 percent to 82,394 MT, but is still severely limited by market access restrictions.

The third largest, South Korea, grew by 28 percent to 24,390 MT; these gains were made exclusively from chipping potatoes. Japan, also exclusively chipping potatoes, had a slight decline of 3 percent.

The US exports both chip-stock and table-stock to Taiwan where there was a 20 percent increase in sales last year. Malaysia, also a mixed market, had a decline of 21 percent in exports, despite a 25 percent increase in total exports to this market. The EU claimed almost all of this increase.

United States Potato Board said that despite lingering market access issues in some markets, exports to Central America increased by 11 percent. This increase was at the expense of exports from Canada as the overall market shrunk by 13 percent.