China says it will buy more soybeans, but American farmers see a bleak future
- Although growers acknowledge ‘encouraging’ pledge from Beijing, they aren’t convinced industry can get back to where it was before trade war began
China’s surprise pledge last week to buy more American soybeans has failed to convince US farmers that brighter days lie ahead.
In a meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday, Liu He, China’s vice-premier and lead trade negotiator, told the US president and his advisers that China was committed to purchasing another 5 million metric tonnes of American soybeans.
The announcement, which was not discussed or anticipated as part of the trade negotiations, was seen as an olive branch extended by China in the hope of moving the two sides closer to the finish line of a trade truce. Trump responded with a quip that the deal would “make our farmers very happy”.
But US soybean farmers and exporters, acknowledging the news as “encouraging” and “positive”, stressed that the damage done to the industry from the trade war was far from over.
“It’s a good movement,” said John Wesley Boyd, a mid-scale farmer from southern Virginia producing on 375 acres of soybean crop, who is also president of the Black Farmer's Association. “But I don’t see the pendulum swinging back towards me as a producer in the field.”
Like Boyd, many American soybean growers were crushed by falling prices due to the sudden loss of their biggest buyer after the trade war began last year.
