"American farmers see a rebound in sales to China and want to get more orders." Hong Kong's South China Morning Post published an article on February 12 saying that agricultural cooperation was once a stabilizing factor in Sino-US relations, but it was frustrated by the influence of friction and geopolitical competition provoked by the United States. Now that China and the United States are resuming talks on areas such as military communication and counter-narcotics, agriculture between the world's two largest economies is also picking up, and despite the serious geopolitical differences the two countries have faced over the past year, agriculture remains one of the areas where the two sides are "relatively consistent", creating room for further cooperation.
Before the Sino-US summit in San Francisco last November, Iowa soybean producers signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with China, the first large-scale signing between China and the United States since 2017, the article said. Chinese buyers bought more than 3 million mt of soybeans, the country's biggest one-day order in months, according to the USDA.
Around the same time, dozens of U.S. agricultural representatives also traveled to Beijing and Shanghai. U.S. Ambassador to China Burns told the delegation that agriculture plays a "ballast stone" role in the "vast and complex" U.S.-China relationship.
China has ordered 20.2 million mt of U.S. soybeans in the 2023-2024 marketing year, which begins Sept. 1, down from 27.2 million mt a year earlier, USDA data showed. According to data released by the General Administration of Customs of China, from January to December 2023, China's total soybean imports were 9,94090,000 tons, compared with 8,921 in 202280,000 tons, up 114%。
Ic photo of soybeans being harvested in a field in Walworths, Wisconsin, USA
The article mentions that in the past few decades, before U.S.-China relations fell to their current lows, agricultural cooperation has been seen as a bellwether for the two countries' interest in cooperation in science, technology and people-to-people exchanges. In the eyes of U.S. agricultural leaders, this recent gesture of goodwill has turned agriculture back into a stabilizing force, and the relationships built through agriculture have helped restore trust, despite the remaining tensions in U.S.-China diplomatic relations. Other analysts argue that agriculture remains an interdependent area, which could help define a path for the two countries to rebuild relations, but only if they do not use agricultural products as a political tool.
On the morning of January 18, local time, Tang Renjian, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China, co-chaired the seventh meeting of the China-US Joint Committee on Agriculture with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack in Washington, D.C., to restart the Sino-US agricultural cooperation mechanism, reaffirm that the Joint Committee is an important channel for regular exchanges between the agricultural departments of the two countries, and promise to cherish, carefully care for and stabilize the operation of this mechanism. The two sides had a frank and in-depth exchange of views on climate-smart agriculture, food security, people-to-people exchanges, and facilitation.
The article points out that since joining the World Organization in 2001, China has been one of the most important agricultural partners of the United States. China's share of U.S. agricultural exports increased from 2 percent in 2000 to more than 17 percent in 2020, according to the report. However, this good momentum was interrupted in 2018, when Trump provoked friction against China, and Biden did not lift Trump-era tariffs after taking office. However, the data showed that China's soybean imports in 2020-2021 more than doubled from the previous year. In 2020, 55% of U.S. soybean exports went to China. China also imported a record 70760,000 tons of U.S. pork and 4370,000 tons of U.S. beef, well above 2017 levels.
Even with the friction, China remains one of the largest markets for U.S. feed grains such as soybeans and poultry products such as chicken feet. In 2019, China lifted its ban on U.S. poultry, which lasted more than four years due to the bird flu problem. Since then, U.S. poultry exports to China have surged more than 100-fold. In 2022, chicken feet accounted for more than 85% of U.S. poultry exports to China.
Zhang Wendong, a food and agriculture economist at Cornell University in the United States, believes that agriculture is one of the areas where the two countries are "relatively consistent", creating room for more cooperation. In addition to focusing on China's demand for commodities such as soybeans, the United States could explore the Chinese market by "balancing and diversifying" its product portfolio through consumer-oriented products such as dairy, fruits and vegetables and even wine and spirits, he said.
He added that traditional agriculture is one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, and climate-smart agriculture is another possible area of cooperation, with many potential opportunities to learn from each other, both at the ** level and at the business level.
Greg Taylor, chairman of the U.S. Poultry and Egg Export Committee, an industry group, has been pushing for normalization between China and the United States. "It's important to keep politics out of the equation because we all have a need for something we can't produce," he stressed. ”
We are very dependent on the Chinese market. We want to see it come back so we can bring the product to market. Taylor said.
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