US soybean growers squeezed as China's farm buying lags pledge

China's buying of US farm goods is lagging a $17 billion commitment, Reuters reported on Monday, putting a trade pledge under strain as American soybean growers face higher costs and weaker Chinese demand.

Neither report specified how far purchases have fallen short of the $17 billion figure, or the period the commitment covers.

Nikkei Asia reported that the fall in Chinese demand has left a hole that temporary trade truces cannot easily plug, and that rising input prices and softer demand are squeezing soybean growers. It gave no figures for the drop in demand or the rise in costs.

Nikkei Asia reported that for Tyler Stafslien, a fourth-generation farmer in central North Dakota, running the 2,500-acre property his family has owned since 1912 feels increasingly like a rescue mission.

Nikkei Asia carried its account in its coverage of the US midterm elections, the contests held between presidential votes that decide control of Congress, and framed the pressure on growers as a test of their loyalty to Trump. It did not say how the contests might change farm policy or the pledge itself.

Reuters put the $17 billion commitment at the centre of its report, treating the pace of Chinese purchases as the measure of whether the deal holds. Nikkei Asia led with the growers, the cost of seed, fuel and fertiliser, and the politics around them.

Both accounts place the same crop at the centre of the dispute and the same two governments on either side of it. Where they part is on what the shortfall means: a broken promise on trade, in Reuters' telling, or a farming constituency drifting from a president it backed, in Nikkei Asia's.