How can I loop through entity reference values?
According to the entityreference_field_schema() function, the column name for an entity reference field is target_id (not value). That said, to extract the node ids you should probably use something like this:

$nids = array();
foreach ($node-&gt;field_exporter_countries[$node-&gt;language] as $index =&gt; $item) {
  $nids[] = $item['target_id'];
}

$nodes = entity_load('node', $nids);

// etc...