As the United Kingdom looks to leave the European Union after cutting what it hopes will be a last-minute deal, UK leaders are looking to expand trade with the U.S., Chicago-based British Consul General John Saville said during a Des Moines visit Feb. 7. 

That’s especially true for the agriculture and finance industries, Saville said.

“The top kind of items on the list for a free trade agreement [between the UK and United States] are going to be agriculture and financial services. Where better to go than Iowa?” Saville explained during a chat in the Statehouse cafeteria alongside veteran Republican operative David Oman. Saville assists Brits in 14 central U.S. states.

Iowa already has more than 70 businesses with connections to the UK, accounting for 1,000 to 12,000 of Iowa’s jobs, Saville said. The idea is to add more. 

Saville was on the second and last day of a whirlwind tour that saw him meet with Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen (look for a memorandum of understanding on research later), Kemin chief Chris Nelson, Berkshire Hathaway exec William Fehrman (about energy and exploration), Billi Hunt of the Cultivation Corridor, and execs at Cementech in Indianola. 

That is the local angle on discussions that also are heating up at the federal level, with the trade representatives of the UK and United States meeting to “leverage a really strong bilateral relationship,” Saville said.
“We’re not quite in the space where we can negotiate a free trade agreement, but you know we’re close enough friends that we can really talk turkey about, you know, what ought to be in it and how we would take that forward,” he added.

Part of that is working directly with local areas, including Iowa. One of Iowa’s top exports to the UK is farm machinery, a sector that is seeing heavy innovation. The United Kingdom is Iowa’s seventh-largest export market at about $331 million.

Iowa will be sending an insurance delegation to the UK in coming months, Saville confirmed. 

And what about the controversial Brexit? 

“It’s about an opportunity,” Saville said, adding that leaving the EU will push the United Kingdom to work more diligently on pacts with the U.S., the individual states and other countries.

“We would like to build on our relationship here in this state,” Saville said. “We have a particular opportunity now as we leave the European Union to start to think about what the future of our trading relationship with the U.S. is as a whole and with the states.”

Saville first came to Iowa as consul general for the World Food Prize last year. He’ll be back at that event this year, with a bigger business delegation, he said. “It was a natural entry point in the sense that it’s something that Iowa clearly takes seriously, it speaks to your agricultural heritage and it kind of projects you onto the world stage in a kind of caring and committed way in terms of feeding the world in the 21st century. We in the UK really take that agenda seriously and respect that and think there are things we can do with you on that. We’ve committed to spending 0.7 percent of our GDP on international development. Along with our seat on the Security Council, that makes us serious development players.”