00:00End of the month, towards the end of the month, of course, is a big meeting taking place.
00:03According to President Trump, they are set to meet with Xi Jinping.
00:06Soybeans look set to be very high on that agenda.
00:09As American farmers are increasingly worried about the lack or absence of orders here out of the Chinese,
00:15their crops will go unpurchased this year without a single trade, generally speaking, with Beijing.
00:21Let's bring in Stephen Engel, our chief North Asia correspondent, on what the latest here as far as soybeans are.
00:26Soybeans, yeah, that's moving up to the top of the agenda as far as issues that Donald Trump wants to talk to Xi Jinping about.
00:34Obviously, because China, essentially, according to the data we have,
00:38has not ordered any soybean cargoes from the United States since the harvest began last month.
00:44And that is a big shock to American farmers, which conventional wisdom would say many of them in the Midwest probably voted for Donald Trump.
00:51And they are getting increasingly angry.
00:52They're worried about stockpiles filling up their silos and prices falling.
00:57And prices have been falling.
00:58They've had the worst two-year stretch of prices in soybeans in a decade.
01:04And right now, prices are down and demand has flatlined.
01:09And that is really concerning these farmers.
01:12And so Donald Trump has said it's going to be a major topic of discussion when he meets Xi in about four weeks on the sidelines of APEC.
01:20And he basically is asserting that China is doing this for negotiating reasons only, by not buying.
01:29It's a negotiating tactic.
01:30And why not?
01:31China knows that the United States needs China because, again, the soybean crops traditionally,
01:38anywhere between 30 to 60 percent of American soybean crops are sent to China, depending on the year, depending on the politics.
01:45And it was a focal point of the first trade deal that Trump negotiated with China.
01:50It fell apart, of course, because of the pandemic and other issues.
01:53But, you know, we need to look at some charts.
01:56Oh, you already brought it up.
01:57There's the flat line, the white line.
02:00China's not buying.
02:01And it's been four weeks of the harvest already since the beginning of September.
02:05We're one-fifth the way through the harvest, according to the industry groups.
02:11And this is expected to be about 117 million metric ton crop this year.
02:16And they could be sitting idle.
02:19So that's a big problem.
02:21Let's bring up a next chart about the sentiment that farmers have right now.
02:26Now it's sinking because of the potential of overflowing storage bins.
02:31And then we can bring up the next chart and show the prices, how they've looked over the last couple of years.
02:37It's a ski slope downwards.
02:39Yeah.
02:39So we talk about, you know, soybeans possibly be a negotiating tactic by China.
02:45We've talked about the priorities already leading up to APEC.
02:48It seems like it's TikTok, maybe a little bit of Taiwan.
02:51Industrial magnets.
02:52What does this trade deal potentially look like now between U.S. and China?
02:57If we could still call it a trade deal, actually.
02:58We don't even know if it's a trade deal.
03:00Donald Trump's been a pretty open book in his negotiating tactics.
03:04How open has China been in its strategy?
03:06Other than you follow the money, you follow the data.
03:10China clearly is buying from Argentina.
03:12They're buying soybeans from Brazil.
03:14They're not buying from the United States at all this year, or this harvest.
03:19So, again, you have to kind of, you know, I would probably agree with Donald Trump that China is using this as a negotiating tool.
03:27Why not?
03:28If they have that leverage, why not?
03:31And Republican lawmakers already in the last 24 hours or so, after having a closed-door meeting with the U.S. ambassador to China,
03:37David Perdue got the assessment, I assume, from him that China is not going to be buying anytime soon.
03:44Why?
03:45Because that meeting between Xi and Trump is not going to happen for another four weeks.
03:48So another month of the harvest is going to go untouched by China.
03:52So, again, it's becoming a bit dicey time for farmers.
03:56That's why Trump, again, mentioned today that we might use some of that revenue that they're getting from tariffs and send that in the form of aid to farmers.
04:04But, again, farmers, from the farmers Bloomberg News has talked to, they don't want handouts.
04:09They want a trade deal with China.
04:11That's sustainable.
04:12And they know that their crops will be sent.
04:15If they get cash handouts, they still have that excess inventory.
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