Soybeans at top of agenda for Trump, Xi

As President Trump prepares for a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, “At the top of the U.S. agenda is the need to get China to resume purchases of American soybeans,” National Journal White House correspondent George Condon wrote late Tuesday.

National Journal noted, “Before Trump’s 2018 trade war, China was the top market for those American farmers. Now, in his second term, those sales have dropped to zero. The American Farm Bureau Federation said soybean exports to China have fallen from 985 million bushels in 2024 to zero this summer.”

“If we don’t sell soybeans soon, there will be enormous losses and lots of bankruptcies in the U.S.,” Philip Luck, deputy chief economist at the State Department in the Biden administration, told National Journal. “At the very least, the president probably needs to have something that looks like a resolution to the agricultural concerns.”

The trip “comes at a very challenging time, where leaders are looking to manage the spillovers of the disruption the U.S. has made in the global economy and the escalating decoupling and competition between the U.S. and China,” Luck said. “If we see progress, it’ll be on solving the small bilateral irritants that have essentially come from many different rounds of the tariff war.”