China vows to boost US farm trade but leaves details unclear

By Ella Cao and Naveen Thukral BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -China pledged to expand farm trade with the United States and President Donald Trump said Beijing would buy "tremendous" volumes of soybeans, but neither gave specifics, disappointing investors hoping for a return of its once-robust purchases. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday after a meeting with President Xi Jinping that China would begin buying "tremendous amounts of soybeans and other farm products immediately". China's commerce ministry said it would expand agricultural trade with the United States but did not specify the scale or timing of purchases. The most-active soybean contract on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) fell about 2% and was trading down 1.28% at $10.8-1/2 a bushel, as of 0743 GMT, retreating from a 15-month high hit in previous sessions on hopes of a trade deal. [GRA/] "The implementation details matter a lot – for example will China roll back tariffs on U.S. agriculture products or will they only create a bureaucratic process for exempting them on a case by case basis?" said Even Rogers Pay, director at Beijing-based Trivium China. "That makes a big difference in whether there's a temporary uptick in purchasing or a sustainable structural return to the market." The world's biggest soybean buyer and the top market for U.S. farmers has turned its vast appetite for U.S. crops into a powerful trade war bargaining chip. Facing import duties of 23% on soybeans after rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, Chinese buyers largely shunned the U.S. autumn harvest, turning instead to South American supplies. "It is disappointing for the Chinese soybean market that no details were announced," said an oilseed trader at an international trading firm. "The market had been expecting China to cut tariffs on U.S. soybean imports." The drop in demand has cost U.S. farmers – a key pillar of Trump's political base – billions of dollars in lost sales. In a sign of thawing relations, China has purchased its first cargoes of U.S. soybeans from the 2025 harvest in recent deals, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Since the trade war of the first Trump administration, China has diversified its sources of soybean imports. In 2024, China bought roughly 20% of its soybeans from the United States, down from 41% in 2016, customs data shows. (Reporting by Ella Cao in Beijing and Naveen Thukral in Singapore; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

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