With just one and a half months to go before the year ends, China still hasn’t ramped up purchases of U.S. soybeans under a trade agreement made with Donald Trump a few weeks ago.
After he met with Xi Jinping at a regional economic summit in South Korea, the White House said Beijing committed to buying at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans during the final two months of 2025 and buying at least 25 million tons annually in 2026, 2027, and 2028.
That’s after China hadn’t placed any orders for U.S. soybeans this harvest season amid the trade war with Trump, creating panic among farmers who had relied on the world’s second largest economy as their top export market.
Meanwhile, Beijing has turned to Brazil and Argentina for soybeans, which are also cheaper as they don’t face retaliatory Chinese tariffs. Now, China has imported so much supply from South America it has a glut of soybeans.
Like so many people with basic economic education, I was wondering for the longest time how Trump squared being elected on the promise to lower prices with his predilection for tariffs. I assume Xi Jinping did the same and decided American tariffs were all bluster.
Trump had to lower the tariffs on China before people started buying Christmas toys, regardless of soybeans. He may even have invented the help for the soybean farmers because he didn’t want to pay subsidies. Meanwhile, it’s not just that China is unlikely to buy soybeans from America as long as Trump is President, they’d be fools to.