After President Donald Trump’s recent meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, there is hope for U.S. farmers that the soybean business may be on the way back.
At the China International Import Expo last week, Illinois soybean farmer Scott Gaffner said he came to Shanghai to save his China business.
“We want to make sure that our soybeans are getting exported to China because it’s a very important market to us,” Gaffner, who is a member of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told CNBC.
He said the Gaffner Family Farm typically sells 40% of its annual soybean exports to China, but as he arrived in Shanghai, that number this year was zero.
As part of the trade arrangement discussed between Trump and Xi in the South Korean port city of Busan at the end of October, China lifted retaliatory tariffs on some agricultural products. But it has maintained a 13% tariff on U.S. soybeans.
The White House said China will buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans by the end of this year and 25 million for each of the next three years.
That’s still down from the nearly 27 million metric tons China bought in 2024. The country has yet to confirm the Trump administration’s numbers.
“We’d like to have just kind of a continuation of smooth sailing,” said Jim Sutter, CEO of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, at his group’s booth at the expo. “Do I think that’s realistic? I don’t know. These are two big, powerful countries, a lot of issues.”
Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, told CNBC last week that the U.S. and China have stabilized the relationship for now, but “structural differences remain.”
Uncertainty is typical of the relationship between the two economic powers, but the negotiation around soybean purchases this time around is playing out more urgently than Trump’s first term, as China has been diversifying away from U.S. supply.
Even before the trade war, the Chinese were buying more from other countries like Brazil and Argentina, and as tensions built, Beijing specifically stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans to pressure Trump.
The move caused major financial problems for American farmers like Gaffner.
“Normally, whenever we are combining the soybeans, we’re going take them right to the river, down the river to Louisiana and then ship out to China,” Gaffner said. “But with China not buying any soybeans, we’re taking them right to our bins, and we’re storing them in our bins.”
Gaffner is still optimistic.
Towards the end of his trip, he got a call that his farm had sold one shipment of soybeans.
“We like no trade war, because hopefully that levels the playing field,” he said. “We just want to do business.”
