China Warns of Threat to U.S. Farm Trade

 China's Peoples Daily warned that a trade war could destroy the foundation of China-U.S. agricultural cooperation. An April 2 opinion piece praised the mutual complementarities in agricultural trade between the two countries, pointing out that U.S. agricultural products fulfill demands in the China market while also driving industry development and farm income growth in the United States. 

The article blames the U.S. for impacts on U.S. farmers expected to result from China's imposition of tariffs that specifically target U.S. agricultural products in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Chinese products.

On its face, the article seems to be aimed at the Trump administration, but it seems unlikely that Trump administration officials will read a Chinese language article in a publication whose readership is primarily communist party officials. Chinese officials have already decided to impose tariffs aimed at farm products, so who is this article trying to convince? 

The Peoples Daily author(s), writing under a name that means "bell sound", cited USDA statistics, the Washington Post, and the head of the U.S. soybean export council to make their case that U.S. farmers will be harmed. Many of the arguments used in this piece echo arguments made by American counterparts over the years to convince Chinese officials to open their market. 

The article claimed that the United States exported $29.1 billion of agricultural products to China in 2023 (I see $28.8 billion on the USDA Global Agricultural Trade System web site). They claimed China was the top destination and accounted for one-fifth of U.S. agricultural exports as they tried to establish the importance of trade with China to U.S. farmers. 

Peoples Daily failed to mention that the value of U.S. agricultural exports to China fell 35 percent between 2022 and 2024, and China's ranking fell to third behind Mexico and Canada in 2024. 

Data from USDA Global Agricultural Trade System.

Data from both countries indicate farm trade has already been disintegrating over the past two years. The share of China's agricultural imports coming from the United States declined from 17 percent to 13 percent between 2022 and 2024, and the share of U.S. agricultural exports going to China fell from 19 percent to 14 percent over those years.

China's State media, including Peoples Daily, typically views imports from the United States as a sinister threat. From time to time they accuse U.S. companies and officials of manipulating prices to cheat Chinese buyers or to drive Chinese companies out of business, attributing U.S. export competitiveness to subsidies or large farms, or spreading innuendos about health risks of American foods. 

The article promised that China would be a growing market for high-quality food products. It hailed a meeting in January 2024 to restart China-U.S. technical exchanges in agriculture. This presumably refers to a meeting with the Biden administration's secretary of agriculture who has now left office. The Minister of Agriculture who participated in that meeting was arrested for corruption last year.

Appearing on the same page of the Peoples Daily were articles about: meetings in Geneva discussing China's achievements on the UN's human rights council; the Chinese foreign minister's meeting with Putin where China and Russia pledged to strengthen their "strategic relationship" as a model for the rest of the world; and a former Finnish prime minister's praise of China's Bao'ao Forum for Asia as a platform for building international consensus.

It is instructive to look back at the U.S. and China agreement on agricultural cooperation signed in 1999 following a bilateral agreement that green-lighted China's accession to the WTO. China and the U.S. agreed on collaborative work on plant protection, conventional crop breeding, and to help Chinese officials understand the U.S. biotechnology regulatory system. The Peoples Daily praised results of cooperation in biotechnology and precision agriculture. But 25 years later China is prioritizing development of its own crop varieties with the same traits prioritized in the 1999 cooperation plan (such as salinity tolerance) to achieve independence from U.S. and other foreign seed suppliers. China has prioritized some of the 1999 topics for its own work--such as post-harvest storage and precision agriculture. Biotech crops were a regular flashpoint of conflict in agricultural trade ever since China introduced its first GMO labeling law in 2001.