After a recent meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, there is hope that the soybean business may be returning to American farmers.
At last week’s China International Import Expo, Illinois soybean farmer Scott Gaffner said he came to Shanghai to save his China business.
“China is a very important market for us, so we want to make sure our soybeans are exported to China,” Gaffner, a member of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told CNBC.
Gaffner Family Farms typically sells 40 percent of its annual soybean exports to China, he said, but when he arrived in Shanghai, that number was zero this year.
As part of a trade deal negotiated between President Trump and President Xi in the South Korean port city of Busan in late October, China lifted retaliatory tariffs on some agricultural products. However, it maintained a 13% tariff on U.S. soybeans.
The White House announced that China will purchase 12 million tons of soybeans by the end of this year and 25 million tons in each of the next three years.
This is still less than the approximately 27 million tons that China purchased in 2024. China has not yet confirmed the Trump administration’s numbers.
“We’re hoping things continue to be smooth sailing,” Jim Sutter, CEO of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, said at the group’s booth at the expo. “Do you think that’s realistic? I don’t know. These are two big, powerful countries, but they have a lot of problems.”
Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham), told CNBC last week that U.S.-China relations are stable for now, but “structural differences remain.”
The relationship between the two economic powers is fraught with uncertainty, but negotiations over soybean purchases are unfolding with more urgency than during President Trump’s first term, as China diversifies away from U.S. supplies.
Even before the trade war, the Chinese had increased their purchases from other countries such as Brazil and Argentina, and as tensions escalated, Beijing specifically halted purchases of U.S. soybeans to put pressure on President Trump.
This move created major financial problems for American farmers like Gaffner.
“Typically, when we combine soybeans, we take the soybeans straight to the river, go down the river to Louisiana, and then ship them to China,” Gaffner said. “But China doesn’t buy any soybeans, so we just take it to the bin and keep it in the bin.”
Gaffner remains optimistic.
Toward the end of the trip, we received word that the farm had sold one soybean.
“We hope there will be no trade war, because we hope it will level the playing field,” he said. “We just want to do business.”
