Back in 2020, China committed to buying an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services within a two-year period. That Phase One Trade Agreement ended in December 2021 with China purchasing 57 percent of what it originally pledged.
Chris Creguer, District 3 board member of the Michigan Corn Growers Association (MCGA) and a farmer from Unionville, says corn fared well under the deal.
“It’s a bit of a mixed bag,” he says. “On corn, they far exceeded it. We think it’s because they needed the corn one way or another, so they went on a spending spree. In terms of overall ag basket if you will, they were right around 80 percent of their obligations, If you go into manufacturing and energies, they were well-short of that.”
Moving forward, Creguer says organizations like MCGA and National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) are putting pressure on trade officials to keep our trading partners accountable.
“There’s some ongoing discussions within the Biden administration of exactly how you can push China to buy more product,” he says. “If that was an easy answer, we wouldn’t have had to have the Phase One trade deal in the first place. It’s hard to know what kind of levers we need to push.”
As a whole, the agriculture industry is trying to expand export market opportunity to other areas to reduce dependency on China.
“For example, looking at the CPTPP agreement, that encompasses a lot of the other countries in South Asia where population growth is taking off and there’s high demand,” says Creguer. “There is the recently-announced Indo-Pacific Economic Framework—trying to parse out exactly what that means [because] I’m not sure the administration has told us much—but what that could mean for trade and additional market access in that area of the world.”
