Remember how the US decided that China is being aggressive about its economic growth, even to the point of imposing a 25% tariff on Chinese made products, to which China responded with countermeasures?
Remember when Trump said that ‘trade wars are good and easy to win’?
When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018
One of the things that China responded with reactionary tariff measures to was soybeans, making American produced soybeans much less competitive.
This is a bit of an issue for the US soybean producers, but not as much for soy producers in BRICS nations.
Russia and Brazil are picking up some of the slack in the soybean market that China owns due to a decreased US participation.
Bloomberg reports:
China, the world’s biggest soybean importer, almost tripled purchases from Russia amid a trade dispute with the U.S., the biggest producer.
Russia sold about 850,000 metric tons of soybeans to China from the start of the 12-month season in July through mid-May, according to Russia’s agriculture agency Rosselkhoznadzor. That’s more than during any season before and compares with about 340,000 tons sold during all of the previous period, Chinese customs data show.China has already canceled several shipments from the U.S. in anticipation of tariffs on the country’s products. While Brazil is expected to take much of that market share, Russia is also benefiting.
Russian supplies make up less than 1 percent of the 97 million tons of soybeans that China is set to buy overseas this season, U.S. government data show. Russia is a net importer of the oilseed, the data show.
Russian soybean plantings in the far east, the region nearest China, will probably remain little changed during the next season, at about 1.4 million hectares, said Daniil Khotko, an analyst at the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies, or IKAR, in Moscow. They may expand by as much as 20 percent during the next two to three years, he said.
But trade wars are good and easy to win, right? And the list of countries that have an economic gripe with the US isn’t growing? Not quite, in either case, as Europe is presently very much ill at east about the aluminum and steel sanctions, increase in oil prices, partly influenced by the geopolitical fallout from Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal last week, and China has been in a tit for tat trade spat with the US for going on two months, with an outcome that very much adversely impacts trade in Europe and Asia. In fact, with a growing list of nations that find America to be a poor trade partner, or who have been shunned by American markets altogether, it’s quite natural that they might start turning to each other to fill the void that the US market used to fill; that is, before Trump.
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