US President Donald Trump on Friday said that he has asked China to immediately remove all tariffs on US agricultural products, including beef and pork, citing progress in trade talks between the two nations.
In making the demand, Trump said in a tweet that he refrained from increasing US tariffs on Chinese goods to 25 percent from 10 percent on Friday, as he said he would in the absence of progress toward an agreement.
China last year imposed retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural products, although Trump did not indicate that his demand was limited to those penalties.
Soybeans, as well as beef, pork and chicken products were on the first batch of retaliatory tariffs on US$34 billion worth of imports imposed in July, and were subject to an extra 25 percent duty.
It is unclear what effect Trump’s demand could have on ongoing talks, which the US president signaled earlier this week were moving toward an agreement.
US officials are preparing a final trade deal that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) could sign within weeks, people familiar with the matter have said, even as a debate continues in Washington over whether to push Beijing for more concessions.
Trump, speaking to reporters in Hanoi on Thursday after a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, said: “Speaking of China, we’re very well on our way to doing something special. But we’ll see.”
“I am always prepared to walk,” he said. “I’m never afraid to walk from a deal, and I would do that with China, too, if it didn’t work out.”
If China were to remove the tariffs, it would likely be a huge boon to US crop markets that have been caught in the trade spat crossfire. Soybean, pork and ethanol shipments have languished amid the duties.
China is a key destination for most of the world’s biggest agriculture markets.
US farmers and lawmakers have long decried the tariffs, and the US agriculture economy has suffered under the weight of falling crop prices.
China has already made some good-faith purchases of US soybeans after declaring a trade truce with the US in December last year.
Last week, US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said more soybean purchases were coming.
Ending the tariffs would dovetail with a proposal by Beijing to buy an additional US$30 billion a year of US agricultural products, including corn, soybeans and wheat, as part of a possible agreement.
“The markets are a little tired of some of the ups and downs and the eight or 12-hour news cycle of tweets,” said Greg Grow, the director of agribusiness at Archer Financial Services in Chicago. “The market needs to see some confirmation of a deal getting done. If this is a confirmation, and we start to see agreements that are signed, we’ll see a positive reaction for prices. But we need to see confirmation of the news,” Grow said by telephone on Friday.
The preparations for a Trump-Xi summit comes amid conflicting signals from the Trump administration over the prospect of a deal.
US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin on Thursday said that the two nations are working on a 150-page document that would turn into a “very detailed agreement,” but added that “we still have more work to do.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis