May 15 (Reuters) – The United States expects China to sign up to buy “double-digit billions” worth of U.S. farm goods following a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Friday.
Greer noted the 25 million metric ton per year soybean deal agreed last October and said the U.S. also expects to “see an agreement for double-digit billion purchases of ags over the next three years per year coming out of this visit.”
“And that’s more general, that’s aggregate. That’s not just soybeans, that’s everything else,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
Separately, Trump said in an interview aired on Thursday evening on Fox News’ “Hannity” program that “China will buy a lot of our farm products.”
It was not immediately clear what products would be included and whether soybeans would be a part of the “double-digit billion purchases”, but traders and analysts said they expected the existing soybean commitment to be part of the deal, which alone would be worth more than $10 billion.
Soybeans are the top U.S. export to China, the world’s largest buyer by far, and the oilseeds have played a key role in trade negotiations during the first and second Trump administrations.
Greer said China has been fulfilling its soybean commitment purchases and that Washington expects the bulk of further buying to occur in the later part of the year.
“Double digit don’t mean anything but the word ‘later’ means China will not purchase old crop beans,” an Asia-based trader said.
In February, Trump floated the possibility of China buying an additional 8 million tons from the American harvest just past, though traders said such sales were now highly unlikely.
Going into the summit, markets were not anticipating Beijing would raise the soybean target beyond 25 million tons, an expectation that was reinforced by comments from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday suggesting the existing deal took care of the issue.
Traders are closely watching for any reduction in soybean tariffs, which could allow private Chinese crushers to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans after being effectively sidelined from last year’s U.S. harvest by steep duties. At the time, state crop traders were the only active buyers.
(Reporting by Ella Cao, Liz Lee and Lewis Jackson in Beijing, Naveen Thukral in Singapore and David Lawder in Washington; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Himani Sarkar)
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