Press Release

Friday, January 6, 2006

U.S. Small Business Uses OPIC Loan to Build Prune Processing Facility in Poland

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A U.S. small business will use a loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to construct a prune processing facility that will use prunes grown in California, then process and sell them on European markets, OPIC President and CEO Robert Mosbacher, Jr. announced today.

OPIC will provide a $400,000 loan to supplement financing from Richard and John Taylor for construction and operation of a prune processing facility in Grudziadz, approximately two hours south of Gdansk. The facility will focus on prune production for products such as pitted prunes, whole prunes, diced prunes, and prune paste, with a capacity to process 3000 tons of prunes or more.

The facility will obtain bulk volumes of prunes grown in California, including those from the Taylors’ 300-acre fruit and nut farm in Yuba City, process them at international standard, package them in 10-kilogram boxes, then sell them to regional markets in Europe.

Mosbacher noted the project’s several developmental benefits:

• it will provide employment opportunities for Grudziadz, a city of 105,000 people that has suffered 30-percent unemployment since was its major economic resource, military bases, was reduced in the 1990s; and

• give U.S. prune growers access to European markets, where presently the shipment of manufactured prunes in less than bulk-cargo quantities is not economically feasible. EU accession has resulted in a reduced tariff for dried prune imports that was previously available in Poland.

“This project demonstrates the capacity of U.S. small businesses to transfer technological capacity not only for the benefit of an emerging market and a Polish city, but also for the growth of an American industry, in this instance, prune farming,” Mosbacher said. “OPIC is please to support a U.S. small business in such a worthy developmental project.”