Administration says China has purchased 71% of trade-deal target for farm goods, but its metric for that is debatable

"The Trump administration says China has met 71% of its farm-good purchases under the phase-one trade deal. Whether that’s the most accurate way to measure the progress is still up for debate," Mike Dorning and Isis Almeida report for Bloomberg. That's more than $23 billion in agricultural products.

The agreement was not clear about how progress would be calculated; the text of the deal simply calls for products to be purchased and imported into China in 2020. "The agreement explicitly calls for the goods to be imported into China, so on its face, compliance would seem to require not just an outstanding sale, but also delivery within the calendar year," Seth Meyer, associate director of the University of Missouri’s Food & Agricultural Policy Research Institute and former chairman of the Agriculture Department's World Agricultural Outlook Board, told Bloomberg. Calendar-year delivery matters because it can take up to a month for goods to reach China, so some December sales may not count.

An Oct. 23 report from the USTR said that pork and corn sales to China are at an all-time high, and that sales of beef, soybeans, and sorghum are strong as well Keith Good reports for the University of Illinois' Farm Policy News. Moreover, according to inside sources, China is considering importing more corn next year due to increased animal feed demand, Naveen Thukral and Hallie Gu report for Reuters.