The food front: US farmers see sales to China picking up and hope for more
- While the US-China relationship tries to reboot on issues like military dialogue and a drug crackdown, Beijing’s purchases are also quietly rising
- ‘Agriculture remains one of the areas where both sides kind of agree’, creating potential for more cooperation, one analyst says
Grant Kimberley has been more hopeful about the trajectory of US-China trade relations since he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November.
Kimberley, 48, was one of a small group of Iowa farmers who received a special dinner invitation to discuss economic ties with Xi on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
“There’s genuine interest on both sides to try to reset the relationship and, you know, hopefully improve things a little bit,” Kimberley, marketing director at the Iowa Soybean Association, said, calling the meeting a good one.
Xi told his guests – representing the “old friends” who hosted him in Iowa nearly 40 years ago, when he was a low-level Communist Party official on an exchange visit – that his meeting with US President Joe Biden had been positive and that Beijing remained committed to strengthening trade with the US.
For Kimberley, it was personal: when Xi made a return visit to Iowa as vice-president in 2012, his family hosted the Chinese leader at their farm. Xi even operated one of their tractors. Recalling that time, Kimberley has described Xi as “normal and human”.
After years of tension, the US and China are picking up the pieces of their relationship in sectors like military dialogue and policing narcotics traffic. At the same time, one overlooked aspect of the otherwise strained relationship is also easing – agricultural trade between the world’s two biggest economies is picking up.
