Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds.
Iowa’s lieutenant governor moved up her travel plans by a day and left this morning on a trade mission to the far east, avoiding any weather-related delays for the 10-day trip.
Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds and the rest of the delegation will spend six days in Vietnam before moving on to the Philippines for four days.
Representatives of Iowa’s beef and pork industries are part of the 20-member delegation, along with executives from a few Iowa manufacturing firms and other state officials.
While the traditional focus of such “trade missions” has been to expand the number of Iowa-made products and Iowa-grown commodities that are sold abroad, Reynolds also intends to make the case that companies doing business in Vietnam and the Philippines should expand in Iowa.
“We have a great workforce. We’re centered in the middle of the United States,” Reynolds says. “We’ve got rivers on both sides, a great transportation infrastructure.”
The Philippines has one of the best-performing economies in the region. Vietnam’s economy started growing significantly in the 1990s, but last year Vietnam’s economy recorded its slowest rate of growth since the turn of the century.