Washington (AFP) – President Donald Trump signaled Wednesday that he plans to push Chinese leader Xi Jinping on US soybean purchases when they meet, as American farmers grapple with fallout from his trade wars. “The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I’ll be meeting with President Xi, of China, in four weeks, and Soybeans will be a major topic of discussion,” he added.
Trump said last month that he would meet Xi on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea starting at the end of October. He also said that he would travel to China next year. The talks come after Washington and Beijing engaged in a tit-for-tat tariffs war earlier this year, imposing escalating duties on each other’s exports. While both sides have since agreed to de-escalate tensions, this has been a shaky truce with lingering effects.
Trump on Wednesday reiterated plans to use some US tariff revenues to aid farmers, while taking aim at his predecessor Joe Biden for not enforcing an earlier trade pact with Beijing that involved a step up in farm purchases. Trump’s aggressive trade policies and resulting fallout have weighed on US farmers, including hitting export markets like China.
The American Soybean Association (ASA) has urged Trump to prioritize soybeans in trade talks with Beijing. It warned in August that Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs are “shutting American farmers out of their largest export market going into the 2025 soybean harvest.” China is a top global buyer of soybeans, with the United States once being a major source for the world’s second biggest economy.
But “the US has made zero sales to China in this new crop marketing year due to 20-percent retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to US tariffs,” ASA President Caleb Ragland said last week. “This has allowed other exporters, Brazil and now Argentina, to capture our market at the direct expense of US farmers,” he added in a statement. “The frustration is overwhelming,” he said.
The first Trump administration provided aid to farmers too as his previous trade war gutted exports to what had been a massive market for US soybeans and pork, among other products. During Trump’s first presidency, retaliatory tariffs on the United States caused more than $27 billion in US agricultural export losses from mid-2018 to late-2019.
© 2024 AFP
