Exclusive | In 2012, this Iowa man hosted Xi Jinping. Now Donald Trump’s trade war is hurting his soybean farm
- By June, when Trump’s tariffs elicited a tit-for-tat response from China, US exports of soybeans to its largest market had fallen to 500,000 tonnes
- In November, China’s imports plunged 38 per cent from a year ago to lowest monthly level in two years
On an autumn morning in November, Grant Kimberley told a room full of visitors how income from his 4,000-acre (1,600 hectares) family farm in Maxwell, Iowa, has plummeted by as much as 25 per cent in a year, because of the trade war that his president has started with his largest export market.
“Soybeans and agriculture have become the collateral damage” in America’s relations with its biggest trading partner, Kimberley said, flicking between PowerPoint charts that showed the plunging sales of soybeans and their prices. “Soybean exports to China have fallen by more than 90 per cent, and the price is at a 12-year low.”
But Kimberly, 42, is no ordinary Iowan soybean farmer. His family hosted Xi Jinping in 2012, just a few months before the then Chinese vice-president was promoted to become the head of state of the world’s most populous nation.
Kimberley’s father Rick was named honorary dean of an agricultural college in western China’s Shaanxi province, while the family home has been replicated as a show farm in an agritourism park in Hebei’s provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, near Beijing.
The Kimberleys’ story illustrates how the US-China trade war has upended decades of relations between the two nations, not to mention the US$700 billion of bilateral commerce between the two largest economies on the planet.
China consumes 63 million tonnes of soybeans every year, using the crop mostly for crushing into cooking oil, blending into tofu and milk, and for making feed for livestock. Chinese farmers produce a combined 14 million tonnes of the crop every year, having to import the remainder from the US, Brazil and Russia.