China spends big on beef from Latin America-Caribbean as copper drops among exports

Governments from the region are moving to boost relations with China, with more leader visits and new trade agreements

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A Boston University Global Development Policy Centre says beef imports from the Latin America-Caribbean region to China have doubled in volume in the past five years. Photo: Reuters

Published: 5:00pm, 5 Aug 2024Updated: 8:41pm, 5 Aug 2024

For the first time since China became a major trading partner of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations, frozen beef ranked among the top five imports from the region into China in 2023, displacing refined copper, a US university study shows.

A new economic bulletin for 2024 from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre said beef imports – mainly from Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay – to China had doubled in volume in the past five years and roughly quintupled in the past decade.

The region now accounts for more than three-quarters of China’s beef imports.

Last year, China bought 2.084 million tonnes of frozen beef from Latin America and the Caribbean, more than half of it from Brazil, followed by major contributions from Argentina and Uruguay.

China’s beef imports from LAC have grown from about a quarter of a million tonnes a decade ago, boosted by many new trade agreements Beijing has signed with LAC countries, although the increase has attracted concern about potential environmental damage from China’s agricultural demand.

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Researchers at the Boston University Global Development Policy Centre said the rise to fifth-top import was due in part to the falling price of refined copper, which has traditionally been the fifth-largest commodity export to China.