Soybeans sacrificed in Trump’s China gamble

As the clock ticks down on President Donald Trump’s deadline to seal a trade deal with China, a top U.S. farming industry is becoming collateral damage — again.

Trump launched his tariff war earlier this year expressing confidence that China’s reliance on the U.S. market would force Beijing to accept trade terms that benefited American businesses and consumers. Six months after the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and weeks from the Nov. 10 White House cutoff for a trade pact between the two countries, U.S. soybean farmers are learning that China — long the predominant market for their product — doesn’t need them anymore.

China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May, according to the American Soybean Association. Beijing has pivoted to suppliers in Brazil and Argentina — logging huge orders for Latin American beans and leaving U.S. farmers in the cold and panicking.

The dramatic shift echoes China’s response to the tariff war during Trump’s first term when the value of U.S. soybean exports plunged to $3.1 billion in 2018 from $14 billion in 2016.

“How can we be surprised? It’s a repeat of Trump 1.0,” said Marc Busch, who has advised both the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department from 2012 to 2018 on trade and is a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University. “They didn't need Liberation Day or fentanyl tariffs to get them to rush to this playbook — it had been well worn in the first Trump administration and to great effect.”

Beijing’s new pullback hits especially hard because some U.S. farmers have never fully recovered from the impact of Trump’s first-term trade wars on their access to China, which had previously made up about 60 percent of soybean exports.

The 20 percent retaliatory tariff that Beijing has imposed on U.S. imports hasn’t just pounded soybean producers. All agriculture exports to China were down 53 percent in the first seven months of 2025, compared with the same period last year, according to USDA data.

China’s move to stop buying U.S. soybeans underscores how Trump’s ambitions to use aggressive tariffs as a lever for better trade deals with Beijing have repeatedly backfired. The Chinese government has responded with counter-tariffs, an array of non-tariff trade retaliation tactics, export restrictions on critical minerals and has now slammed the brakes on a key U.S. agricultural export sector that faces potential ruin if Chinese buyers stay away.

The White House said that its aware of the plight of U.S. soybean farmers and will take measures to cushion financial losses imposed by their loss of Chinese buyers.