New data the Agriculture Department released Friday created serious doubts about whether China will really buy millions of bushels of American soybeans like the Trump administration touted last month after a high-stakes meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n
The USDA report released after\u00a0the government reopened<\/a> showed only two Chinese purchases of American soybeans since the summit in South Korea that totaled 332,000 metric tons. That\u2019s well short of the 12 million metric tons that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins<\/a> said China agreed to purchase by January and nowhere near the 25 million metric tons she said they would buy in each of the next three years.<\/p>\n American farmers<\/a>\u00a0were hopeful that their biggest customer would resume buying their crops. But CoBank\u2019s Tanner Ehmke, who is its lead economist for grains and oilseed, said there isn\u2019t much incentive for China to buy from America right now because they have plenty of soybeans on hand that they have bought from Brazil and other South American countries this year, and the\u00a0remaining tariffs<\/a>\u00a0ensure that U.S. soybeans remain more expensive than Brazilian beans.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are still not even close to what has been advertised from the U.S. in terms of what the agreement would have been,\u201d Ehmke said.<\/p>\n Beijing has yet to confirm any detailed\u00a0soybean purchase agreement<\/a>\u00a0but only that the two sides have reached \u201cconsensus\u201d on expanding trade in farm products. Ehmke said that even if China did promise to buy American soybeans it may have only agreed to buy them if the price was attractive.<\/p>\n Trump said his team spoke with Chinese officials today and they assured the White House they would be purchasing more soybeans, but he didn\u2019t offer any details of how much.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re in the process of doing not only a little bit but they\u2019ll be doing a lot of soybean purchases,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n The Chinese tariff on American beans remains high at about 24%, despite a 10-percentage-point reduction following the summit.<\/p>\n Soybean prices fell sharply by 23 cents to $11.24 per bushel Friday. Ehmke said \u201cthat\u2019s the market being shocked by the lack of Chinese demand that was confirmed in USDA data today.\u201d Prices are still higher than they were before the agreement when they were selling for $10.60 per bushel, but the price may continue to drop unless there are significant new purchases.<\/p>\n Before the trade agreement, Trump\u00a0had promised<\/a>\u00a0farmers would receive an aid package to help them survive the trade war with China. That was put on hold during the shutdown, and now it\u2019s not clear whether the administration will offer farmers aid like Trump did in his first administration.<\/p>\n