Soybean farmers twisting in the wind during US-China talks

The Washington Examiner cited CEI’s expert on trade

Accordingly, the timeline for the U.S. and China to come to an agreement over soybeans is a major concern, said Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“The harvest has come and gone already, and they can store crops, but only for so long,” Young told the Washington Examiner

It is worth noting that this is not the first time that soybeans have been in the spotlight amid tensions with China.

Trump made a trade deal with China involving soybeans in his first term, called the phase-one trade deal. The agreement entailed China buying $200 billion more of U.S. goods and services in 2020 and 2021. The deal, though, went unrealized after the pandemic hit.

Young described the phase-one deal as “doomed from the start,” but the pandemic also put an “exclamation point” on its failure.

While it is fairly easy for China to ban U.S. imports, as it has done in the case of soybeans, it is also fairly difficult for China to make specific guarantees about how much of a product it can commit to buy, according to Young.

That is because while the Chinese government can buy certain things, it is more challenging for Beijing to ensure that private companies in the Chinese food industry buy up amounts that satisfy those commitments.

“So even if they do a phase-one deal style guarantee now, like they tried to do back then, it wouldn’t necessarily work,” Young said. “They can’t necessarily control where a private company buys their soybeans from — the U.S., or from Russia, from Brazil.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner