China weaponizes ag imports to target Trump and US farmers

As the clock ticks down on President Donald Trump’s deadline to seal a trade deal with China, a top U.S. farming industry is becoming collateral damage — again.

Trump launched his tariff war earlier this year expressing confidence that China’s reliance on the U.S. market would force Beijing to accept trade terms that benefited American businesses and consumers. Six months after the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and weeks from the Nov. 10 White House cutoff for a trade pact between the two countries, U.S. soybean farmers are learning that China — long the predominant market for their product — doesn’t need them anymore.

China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May, according to the American Soybean Association. Beijing has pivoted to suppliers in Brazil and Argentina — logging huge orders for Latin American beans and leaving U.S. farmers in the cold and panicking.

The dramatic shift echoes China’s response to the tariff war during Trump’s first term when the value of U.S. soybean exports plunged to $3.1 billion in 2018 from $14 billion in 2016.

“How can we be surprised? It’s a repeat of Trump 1.0,” said Marc Busch, who has advised both the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department from 2012 to 2018 on trade and is a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University. “They didn’t need Liberation Day or fentanyl tariffs to get them to rush to this playbook — it had been well worn in the first Trump administration and to great effect.”

Beijing’s new pullback hits especially hard because some U.S. farmers have never fully recovered from the impact of Trump’s first-term trade wars on their access to China, which had previously made up about 60 percent of soybean exports.

The 20 percent retaliatory tariff that Beijing has imposed on U.S. imports hasn’t just pounded soybean producers. All agriculture exports to China were down 53 percent in the first seven months of 2025, compared with the same period last year, according to USDA data.

China’s move to stop buying U.S. soybeans underscores how Trump’s ambitions to use aggressive tariffs as a lever for better trade deals with Beijing have repeatedly backfired. The Chinese government has responded with counter-tariffs, an array of non-tariff trade retaliation tactics, export restrictions on critical minerals and has now slammed the brakes on a key U.S. agricultural export sector that faces potential ruin if Chinese buyers stay away.

The White House said that it is aware of the plight of U.S. soybean farmers and will take measures to cushion financial losses imposed by their loss of Chinese buyers.

“U.S. tariffs are addressing major problems related to Chinese-sourced fentanyl ... and longstanding unfair trading practices,” said a White House official granted anonymity to candidly discuss the administration’s trade strategy. “China’s decision to halt soybean purchases, which would go a long ways towards redressing our trade deficit, is unfortunate, but President Trump is committed to providing assistance to farmers if necessary — as he did during his first term.”

The effective boycott of the U.S. soybean industry at the height of the September harvest season suggests more than just a tit-for-tat import curb. The midwestern soybean producing states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Indiana are a key political constituency for the GOP in the run-up to congressional midterm elections next year.

“The Chinese want Trump to feel the pain by having U.S. farmers say ‘This guy is really costing us big time,’” said Harry Broadman, a former assistant U.S. trade representative in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. “They want to get out of the [soy trade] relationship with the U.S. because it’s punishing them with tariffs, but they’re also doing so because they know that these are in areas where votes matter.”

It’s a strategy that appears to be working. Powerful agriculture lobbying groups, traditionally Trump allies, have flooded the White House with complaints that the tariffs are responsible for China’s snub of the U.S. soybean crop.

A person close to the administration said it was “ruffled” and “completely caught off guard,” by the outcry from soybean farmers warning of the potential for financial ruin. That prompted a rush to brief senior officials as well as the president in recent weeks. “There was an information gap. But that was a learning opportunity,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Amid the outcry from farmers, Trump announced Thursday that he plans to use tariff revenue for cash bailouts to farmers “until the tariffs kick in to their benefit.” That will require congressional approval and aid likely won’t reach farmers until early 2026.

China’s freeze on soybean purchases was also top of the agenda of a business delegation from midwestern farm states that met in Beijing last week with China’s chief international trade negotiator Li Chenggang. China made clear it’s not budging and that soybean farmers should blame Trump’s tariffs rather than Beijing.

“On the soybean trade, the U.S. should take positive action to remove unreasonable tariffs,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told reporters Friday.

The Trump administration’s plan to provide Argentina with a potential $20 billion-dollar financial backstop to reboot its ailing economy is worsening the domestic political fallout, particularly given the South American country’s position as a soybean export competitor.

“Why would USA help bail out Argentina while they take American soybean producers’ biggest market??? We shld use leverage at every turn to help hurting farm economy Family farmers shld be top of mind in negotiations by representatives of USA,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in an X post Thursday.

Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping may make progress toward a trade pact when they meet on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in South Korea next month. But agricultural industry leaders say that even if that meeting results in an agreement, it will be too late to save many U.S. farmers’ bottom lines.

“[By then], half our shipping window’s already gone,” said one soybean industry representative. “It’s past crunch time for our farmers, and we haven’t seen any movement to give us hope that there will be a resolution in time for us to actually ship anything to China.”

The longer-term outlook for a return to large-volume soybean sales to China looks equally grim. Beijing’s distrust of the durability of Trump administration trade pledges — and Xi’s drive for self-sufficiency to insulate his economy from foreign pressure — may mean that U.S. farmers have lost access to the Chinese soybean market for the foreseeable future.

“For China, the U.S. is now considered unreliable — at what point will the U.S. cut off soybeans or other natural gas or other resources, because they’re doing it with chips and other things,” said Cameron Johnson, a senior partner at Shanghai-based supply chain consultancy Tidalwave Solutions.

The longer that Chinese buyers turn their backs on U.S. suppliers, the lower the likelihood that they’ll see a return to large volume soybean sales to feed China’s market.

“The supply lines are going to get solidified, and once they solidify, China will be like ‘Why would I deal with an American supplier when I can still get the same material from Brazil or Argentina, and maybe it’s slightly more expensive, but I know those guys aren’t going to cut me off or screw with my shipments, unlike the U.S. government,’” Johnson said.

Beijing also has geostrategic reasons to leave behind U.S. soybean producers in favor of Latin American suppliers. China’s sharp increase in purchases of Brazilian soybeans coincides with sky-high political tensions between Washington and Brasilia.

The Trump administration has hammered Brazil with 50 percent tariffs and imposed sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraesky in response to what Trump has called the politicized prosecution and conviction of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro for a coup attempt in 2022. Trump considers Bolsonaro a political ally and has decried his prosecution as “a terrible thing.”

Meanwhile, China has romanced Latin America in recent years with massive investments through its Belt and Road international infrastructure investment initiative, a $9 billion credit line announced in May and a growing number of free-trade deals with countries including Peru, Chile and Costa Rica.

“The U.S. is actually helping expand Beijing’s influence in Latin America by sharply reducing foreign aid and raising taxes on their exports to the U.S.” said Benjamin Geden, a former National Security Council director for the southern half of the region and now a fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Chinese state media has trumpeted the U.S.’ aggressive trade policies as an opportunity for Beijing to deepen ties in the region. “In the face of U.S. unpredictability, Beijing is cutting tariffs and providing preferential access, all of which supports more trade,” state media reported Thursday.

That reflects Beijing’s confidence that its decades of efforts to deepen ties with Latin American countries is paying off by allowing it to lessen China’s trade dependency on the U.S.

“It’s a way to send a clear message — that China has other friends in the world, especially in the global South,” said Leland Lazarus, a former special assistant to the head of U.S. Southern Command. “Now those countries are providing a safety valve for China and strengthen its negotiating position with the U.S.”