America Bet the Farm on Soybeans. Then Came Trump. [View all]

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-10-16-amercia-farming-soybean-monoculture-bailouts/



Soybean farmers across the U.S. are facing a uniquely difficult harvest season. Nominally priced at about $24.5 billion, soybeans are the US’s top agricultural export, popular due to their flexible usage and stability in storage. The world relies on products born from soybeans, which are used for everything from tofu to livestock feed, and people will pay big money for them. Last year, China bought around $12.6 billion worth of American soybeans (about half the total, as usual), with the European Union ($2.45 billion) and Mexico ($2.3 billion) following in second and third place. But as a result of President Trump’s ongoing trade war, China stopped buying soybeans from the US in May, leaving the agricultural industry with a gaping void that has exposed the true instability of the farm economy.

There’s little prospect of those sales ever coming back, as China has already found replacement soybeans from Brazil and Argentina. Without that export market, the American farm economy is in deep and immediate trouble. Yet there are more profound problems revealed by this crisis: namely, an attachment to large-scale monocrop farming and a corresponding habit of passing farm bailouts when this leads to disaster—as it often does. In the past year, two farm aid packages have been passed, and another is likely. But without deeper reform, this will bank up even more problems for the future.

A new report from Farm Action published this month details the multiple problematic elements contributing to the precarious state of the farm economy. Farm Action is a nonpartisan, farmer-led watchdog group that works to support the needs of farmers, workers, and rural communities over the interests of the government and large corporations. “We published this report because this is really capturing some of the resiliency issues that we're concerned about with this system, where we really are dependent on an overproduction of certain crops, and those crops are very reliant on a handful of global trade partners,” Sarah Carden, Farm Action’s research and policy director, told the Prospect.

After opting not to purchase soybeans from the U.S., China turned to two of the country’s top competitors: Brazil and Argentina. In September, China bought 93 percent of Brazil’s soybean exports, and purchased millions of tons of soybeans from Argentina when the country dropped its grain export taxes. This has been a godsend for Argentina, which is on the brink of economic collapse touched off by its ultra-libertarian president, Javier Milei, but still not as useful as the $20 billion in American aid that Trump recently directed to the country. It’s remarkable: Trump is simultaneously wrecking American agriculture while also subsidizing its foreign competition, where several friends of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent coincidentally have large business interests. America first!

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