U.S. farm leaders, visiting China, talk up agriculture trade

A delegation from 11 groups including the U.S. Soybean Export Council, U.S. Grains Council and U.S. Wheat Associates is visiting a week after Chinese grain buyers signed non-binding agreements in Iowa to buy billions of dollars worth of produce, mostly soybeans, the first such signing since 2017.

This week’s visit, the likes of which had become rare due to bilateral tensions and three years of Chinese Covid-19 border controls, comes ahead of an expected meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden in San Francisco this month.

“We’ve got a big complicated relationship, but agriculture is the ballast in the relationship,” Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, told the gathering.

The US Grains Council officials visited China’s commerce ministry earlier on Thursday and raised the country’s anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures against US imports of dried distillers grains (DDGs), a protein-rich byproduct from ethanol production that is fed to animals.

“They suggested we talk with the domestic industry here to have them give their support in the need of the product and they brought up that they’d recently dropped the anti-dumping case on Australian barley, so whether that shows some hope for US DDGs, possibly. I’m not sure,” said Cary Sifferath, vice-president of the US Grains Council.

Oilseeds and grains are the top US export to China, accounting for $25.4bn last year, far ahead of other goods such as semiconductors, but Brazil has been eating into the US share of the Chinese market after harvesting bumper crops of soybeans and corn.

China has been pushing to diversify its import sources in the years since former US President Donald Trump launched a bruising trade war and amid rising geopolitical risks, opening its market to Brazilian corn late last year.

Imports of Brazilian soybeans in the first nine months of 2023 are up 18% year on year compared with an 8% increase in US arrivals. Almost 4-million tonnes of Brazilian corn has reached China, with more on the way.

The delegation, the industry’s largest to China since 2016, will travel to Shanghai for next week’s annual China International Import Expo, where the US department of agriculture is hosting a pavilion for the first time since the event started in 2018.