Agricultural Trade between the U.S. and China.

On April 1st, China's Ministry of Finance announced to impose steep tariffs on a list of US products (see the Chinese version of announcement here). China claims that the action is to respond to the tariffs that were recently imposed on imports of steel and aluminum in the U.S.. 

Several agricultural commodities are included in the list. For instance, 25% tariffs are imposed on "pork and its products". China is a large importer of the U.S. agricultural products. Hence, it is not surprising that China would target at the U.S. agricultural products for retaliation. But, what agricultural commodities can be affected? and how large the impacts could be?

In the figure below, I plot the total export values of U.S. agricultural commodities and the shares that China takes. These are averaged values during 2014-2016. The data are sourced from the US Department of Agriculture. I select commodities that China took more than 10% of the export shares ( in addition to pork).   

The figure shows that China's share on soybean is the largest, amounting to 60%. Meanwhile, the U.S. export value is around 22 billion dollars, which is pretty high. This suggests high possible impacts of soybean tariffs by China on the U.S.. A study by Dr. Tyner and Dr. Taheripour found that "if China imposed 30% tariff, its imports of U.S. soybeans could drop by 71%. Meanwhile, total U.S. soybean exports could fall by 40%" (see link here).

China also takes high export shares in distillers grains (41%), hides (51%) and coarse grains (85%). The coarse grain is mainly sorghum. However, the total U.S. export values of these three commodities are less than 5 billion dollars.

China's share on forest products is 27% and the total U.S. export value is around 9 billion dollars. The forest products mainly include various kinds of limber, such as red oak and white oak and so on. Hence, tariffs on these products would also have prominent impacts on the U.S. agricultural economy.