US soya bean farmers fret as China looks elsewhere

Commodity producers in Brazil, Argentina hope to benefit from impact of trade war

- Kevin Draper and Jack Nicas

NEW YORK - Consider the soya bean. A legume about 1cm in size, it is eaten from the pod as edamame or processed into tofu, soya milk and other products. But that is not why it is one of the world's most lucrative commodities. High in fat and protein, soya beans are what much of the world's livestock eat.

And now the humble crop is at the centre of the trade war between the US and China.

The US sells more soya beans to China, by value, than any other single product. In 2024, that amounted to more than 27 million tonnes, worth US$12.8 billion (S$16.8 billion), or about nine US cents of every US dollar of goods the US sold to China.

But with the enormous tariffs erected between the two countries over the past two weeks, those sales are likely to suffer soon. That is bad news for the American farmers who grow soya beans and the Chinese chicken and hog farmers who buy them - and potentially very good news for the nation ready to step in: Brazil.

American soya bean farmers are worried about whether their biggest customer will keep buying. More than half of US soya bean exports went to China in 2024, but the price just went up 135 per cent under the tariffs China installed in response to President Donald Trump's 145 per cent tax on Chinese imports.

"Farmers deal with bad weather. We deal with pests. We deal with tractors breaking," said Ms Heather Feuerstein, who owns a farm near Grand Rapids, Michigan. "That's our lives."

But tariffs? "This is a threat to our continued way of life," she said.

While Mr Trump says his bulwark of tariffs will create a renaissance in American-made goods, thousands of soya bean farmers like Ms Feuerstein fear he will devastate American agriculture in the process.

At the same time, he could, inadvertently, be helping soya bean farmers in Brazil and Argentina.