U.S.–China Trade Dispute and Potential Impacts on Agriculture

This trade dispute is important to U.S. agriculture, because China has been the United States’ top agricultural export market outside of North America since 2009 with an annual sale of nearly $20 billion in 2017. In 2017, top U.S. agricultural exports to China included soybeans, cotton, hides and skins for leather products, fish, dairy, sorghum, wheat, nuts and pork. Noting the theory of comparative advantage and that China has one-fifth of the world’s population—four times that of the United States—but only one-tenth of the world’s arable land, China primarily exports labor-intensive manufactured products to the United States (e.g., electronics), and the United States primarily exports land-intensive agricultural commodities to China (e.g., soybeans). While the United States has a large trade deficit with China, it has a trade surplus in agricultural products. This issue has articles on the impact of hte trade dispute on agriculture and wine.