China will suspend for a year the additional 24% tariffs it imposed on US goods in April, the Cabinet confirmed on Wednesday. The Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council also announced that it will remove tariffs of up to 15% it imposed on some US agricultural goods effective November 10.
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However, the reduction still leaves Chinese soybean buyers facing 13% tariffs, including the pre-existing 3% base tariff. Traders say that makes U.S. shipments still too expensive for trade buyers compared to Brazilian alternatives. “We do not expect any demand from China to return to the US market with this change,” said a trader at an international trading firm. “Brazil is cheaper than the United States and even non-Chinese buyers are taking Brazilian goods.”
Before President Donald Trump took office in 2017 and began the first U.S.-China trade war, soybeans were the largest U.S. export to China, with the world’s largest agricultural buyer buying $13.8 billion worth of the commodity in 2016. In 2024, China bought nearly 20% of its soybeans from the U.S., down from 41% in 2016, customs data show. China has largely refrained from buying American crops this year, costing American farmers billions of dollars in lost exports.
Investors on both sides of the Pacific breathed a sigh of relief last week when Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, alleviating fears that the world’s two largest economies might abandon talks aimed at resolving the tariff war. While Trump and the White House were quick to publish their opinion on the meeting, the Chinese side did not immediately move to provide a detailed summary. China’s state-owned COFCO bought three cargoes of US soybeans the day before the summit, an act analysts attributed to a goodwill gesture.
Source: Market intelligence platform IndexBox
