Potato Expo participants hear optimistic economic forecasts

Two leading economists, Bruce Scherr and Dave Kohl, see a brighter future in 2011 and beyond for U.S. agriculture, especially for crops that are exported.“The economy is in decent shape,” Sherr told the opening session of the Potato Expo on Jan. 6. “It’s going to be a long haul to get us back to the kind of prosperity we would all love and want, but we will be structurally better off.”

He predicted the U.S. economy will continue to grow at about 3% over the next few years now that the country’s financial structure has been corrected.

A bright spot the experts see for grower-shipper-exporters is the improving lifestyles in emerging countries. China and India brought “as many as 1.5 billion persons from subsistence level to culturally defined middle income” in the past decade, he said, adding that millions of families now enjoy the luxury of home refrigerators.