American soybean farmers have lost billions of dollars worth of sales in China and other markets because of President Donald Trump’s first trade war in 2018.
Now, they hope his trade actions against their archrival Brazil will help bring back that export market.
In particular, they are cheering the Trump administration’s new investigation into Brazilian farmers’ conversion of Amazon forestland into new soybean acreage — a long-term practice that accelerated last decade when China turned to Brazil to replace American suppliers.
“As a result of the trade war and the incentives it provided to Brazil to significantly increase production, the U.S. soybean industry now faces enormous competition with Brazil in every export market, not just China,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in a set of comments this week regarding the investigation.
