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Monday, December 16, 2019

Agriculture-purchase details in trade deal remain murky

U.S. and Chinese negotiators unveiled an interim trade agreement last week, but some trade issues still remain unresolved, and the details of the agreement are unclear. The 86-page agreement, which hasn't been made public yet, is expected to be signed in January, Evelyn Cheng reports for CNBC.

Because trade issues between the two nations are so contentious and wide-ranging, negotiators agreed to break the talks into phases. Both countries announced they had agreed on a "phase one" deal that includes agricultural purchases, which could boost President Trump's re-election bid. China reportedly promised to buy $40 billion in U.S. farm goods per year; Trump said he expected that to increase to $50 billion "pretty soon" and "U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told reporters that China would buy at least $16 billion more agricultural goods in each of the next two years. The report said that could bring total purchases to near $50 billion in 2020 and 2021," Cheng reports.

But economists from Japanese finance company Nomura Holdings Inc., including its chief China economist, Ting Lu, said over the weekend, "That scale of purchases seems implausible and Chinese officials were reluctant to mention any specific target during their press conference," Cheng reports.

Both nations are making conciliatory gestures. "The U.S. held off raising tariffs on Chinese goods on Sunday, and Beijing did not go ahead with planned retaliatory tariffs," Cheng notes. "China has also been increasing its purchases of American soybeans this year, despite an overall expected decline in Chinese demand for the product, according to the U.S. Soybean Export Council."

However, "It’s still unclear how and when the U.S. will roll back other tariffs, a condition for a phase-one deal that the Chinese side has firmly maintained," Cheng reports. "The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in a statement that the United States will keep 25 percent tariffs on about $250 billion of Chinese imports, along with 7.5% duties on roughly $120 billion of Chinese imports."

"Lighthizer said Beijing has also agreed to reduce longstanding non-tariff barriers to U.S. farm exports, including trade restrictions on beef, poultry, seafood, dairy, rice, infant formula, animal feed, pet foods, feed additives and a variety of biotechnology products," Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico's Morning Agriculture. "Farmers have long been frustrated by China’s slow approval process for approving biotech crops, which has impeded U.S. exports of certain corn and soybean varieties."

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