Editor’s note: This story was originally published by the nonprofit newsroom Investigate Midwest; the original includes an interactive graphic that illustrates Chinese investment in Latin American ports. We’re republishing the story because of the importance of soybean farming to the Arkansas economy. As reporter Phillip Powell explained in a feature for the Arkansas Times this fall, Arkansas soybean farmers are facing economic calamity this year due to the impact of President Trump’s trade war with China and other pressures.

From the docks of the Port of Santos, a 58-terminal complex covering an area the size of 1,500 American football fields, ships loaded with soybeans prepare to set sail for China. 

Less than 45 miles from São Paulo, the port services nearly a quarter of Brazil’s soybean exports. For decades, U.S. agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill have operated facilities at the port. 

Today, they share space with COFCO International, China’s state-owned food conglomerate, which has invested around $285 million in recent years. The expansion will make it the port’s largest dry bulk terminal.

And Santos isn’t alone. In the west, the Port of Chancay is rising on Peru’s central coast.

COSCO Shipping, a state-owned Chinese company, is investing at least $3.5 billion to construct 15 berths, logistics facilities, and a 1.1-mile tunnel, enabling cargo to be channelled directly from the port to nearby highways.

Once fully operational, Chancay will function as a regional redistribution hub for exports from Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia: from copper and lithium to soybeans and other agricultural products. Upon completion around 2035, it is expected to become the region’s third-largest port.

These and other recent investments across the region have positioned China to source more agricultural products from Latin America as it pivots away from U.S. farmers in response to President Trump’s higher tariffs. 

China first began that pivot in 2018, when Trump’s first-term tariff hikes ignited a global trade war. But since returning to office, the president has renewed that strategy, and China’s investments signal a generational shift that may not reverse if and when the trade war subsides. 

“What are the signs that China’s here to stay [in Latin America]? Really, the infrastructure,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow with the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a U.S. nonprofit policy research organization that reports 23 ports across Latin America have some degree of Chinese investment.  

“Ports, railways, roads, bridges, metro lines, energy, power plants are probably the best signs that China has a long-term commitment … These are long-term projects.”

Daniel Munch, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that when a country gains control over ports that make trade faster, cheaper and more reliable, such as the Port of Chancay, trade flows tend to “lock in.” Reversing that trend, he warned, would require the United States to narrow its efficiency gap, noting that none of its container ports rank among the world’s top 50.

“It could entrench patterns,” Munch said.

This is bad news for American farmers, particularly soybean growers. 

Soybeans are a cornerstone of American agriculture, particularly in the Midwest. Nationwide, more than 270,000 farms grow the crop, according to the latest Census of Agriculture. In Illinois, nearly half of all farms depend on soybean production, and in Iowa and Minnesota, about four in 10 do.

In 2024, more than 40% of U.S. soybean production was exported, with about half going to China.

But tensions between the United States and China have risen this year – Trump has increased tariffs and recently threatened a 157% tax on all Chinese imports, while China responded by reducing U.S. soybean imports to near zero for six months. 

A trade deal announced in November ends the suspension and includes commitments for China to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and at least 25 million metric tons annually through 2028, according to Purdue University and farmdoc Daily. 

Brazil has stepped in as China’s biggest supplier of soybeans, which are used to feed livestock to support protein demand. 

China has become one of the two main export markets for at least 10 nations, most of them in South America, according to the International Trade Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2023 report by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

From 2010 to 2022, the region accounted for nearly one-third of China’s food imports. Brazil alone supplied about 21% of those imports over the same period.

“In recent years, there has been significant growth in telecommunications projects and across all areas of transportation – including airports, ports, roads, railways, and subways – as well as in sanitation and urban mobility. These sectors account for nearly 60% of the total number of projects,” said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of ECLAC, who highlighted the scale of China’s involvement during the 2024 International Seminar on Contemporary China Studies in Costa Rica.

China has viewed Brazil as a strategic partner for several years, primarily because of its soybean supply, and has responded with infrastructure investments, according to Fernando Bastiani, a researcher with ESALQ-LOG, the Group of Research and Extension in Agroindustrial Logistics at the University of São Paulo.

“Today, COFCO has direct access to farmers, purchases soybeans, and oversees the entire commercialization chain, including storage and transport to China,” Bastiani said. “In recent years, [COFCO] has also realized it needs to control logistics systems and infrastructure, because that’s a key part.”

In Brazil, Bastiani explained, logistics costs account for 20% to 25% of the final soybean price, mainly due to the long distances between farms and ports and the high cost of trucking. “China understood that by investing in infrastructure, it could help make Brazil more competitive,” he said.

In May, the two countries signed new agreements to deepen their agricultural trade ties, granting Brazil authorization to export meat and ethanol byproducts. 

“Amid the changing and turbulent international landscape, China and Brazil should remain committed to the original aspiration of contributing to human progress and global development,” said President Xi Jinping during the meeting.

While Latin America has seen growth, many U.S. ports have experienced a significant decline in business.

At the New Orleans District — a dominant grain corridor — soybean exports grew by less than 3% between September 2024 and September 2025, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Shipments through the Los Angeles District fell almost 15%, while the steepest drop came in the Seattle District, where exports plunged 81%.

Nearly half of all U.S. corn, soybean and wheat exports move through the Mississippi River system, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Market Intel report.

This major inland trade artery connects the Midwest’s farming regions to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying an average of 65 million metric tons annually of bulk agricultural products by barge over the past five years to export terminals near New Orleans, where shipments depart for international markets.

“The facilities that purchase soybeans from farmers extend to our freight railroads, where they don’t have as much volume that they’ve been moving, at least for soybeans,” said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. 

Steenhoek noted that corn exports have remained strong, which has helped sustain some port activity — but it hasn’t solved the underlying problem: “China imports more U.S. soybeans than all of our other international customers combined,” he said.

At the Port of Los Angeles, the largest container port in the Western Hemisphere, agricultural exports have also weakened as trade with China cools.

“Exports in general have been very soft and we attributed it to the retaliatory tariffs that have been put in place by China,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. “Our single biggest export sector is agriculture … of that, soybeans are the number one export commodity.”

Before the first tariffs were introduced in 2018, China accounted for about 60% of the port’s business. Today, it’s closer to 40% and falling, as trade flows and sourcing shift toward countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. 

“We’ve been very aggressive in finding cargo out of other countries,” Seroka said. “But there is no doubt in my mind that we are concerned every day that these policies could impact the amount of cargo that comes to Los Angeles.”

The decrease in exports is not just a hit to farmers, but also to port workers; each four containers handled at the port generates one job, according to Seroka.

“In Southern California, one in nine people has a job related to this port,” said Seroka, referring to dockworkers, truck drivers, brokers and warehouse employees. “It truly is a conversation of national significance.”

U.S. port traffic isn’t poised for a quick rebound despite a recent trade agreement that ends China’s suspension of U.S. soybean imports. After six months of near-zero shipments due to retaliatory trade measures, Beijing in November agreed to purchase 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and to commit to annual purchases of at least 25 million tons through 2028.

A recent analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily said the announcement offered some relief to U.S. farmers at the tail end of harvest, but overall exports to China this year are still on track to be the weakest since 2018, when trade tensions during the first Trump administration slashed volumes to 8 million tons.

“It is very difficult to take a market [China] of over a billion people and replace that,” said John Bartman, a soybean farmer from Marengo, Illinois.

By October, Brazil had exported a record 79 million metric tons of soybeans to China, nearly 80% of its total soybean shipments during the period, according to a farmdoc Daily analysis of data from Brazil’s Foreign Trade Secretariat. Brazil’s total soybean exports reached about 100 million tons between January and October, already surpassing the country’s full-year total for 2024, which was just under 99 million tons.

“U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, wrote in a statement. 

While China builds long-term infrastructure to secure its supply chains, Washington is still struggling to define its trade strategy and to contain the political fallout of renewed tariffs.

In mid-September, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives moved to block Congress from influencing Trump’s tariff policy, even as Senate Democrats prepared to force votes challenging his trade war, The New York Times reported. The maneuver effectively stripped lawmakers of the ability to advance measures to lift tariffs until March 31, 2026, extending a prohibition first imposed in the spring to spare members from taking a politically difficult vote.

“Tariffs not only cause farmers to pay more for their inputs, but they have also seen tariffs reduce markets for U.S. farm products,” said U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, during an October session.

If the November soybean agreement between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping holds, Beijing’s purchases would still fall short of recent norms. Even if China buys at least 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually over the next three years, that volume would remain about 14% below the five-year average shipped to China from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily.

Some purchases have started rolling in. But April Hemmes, an Iowa soybean farmer who has promoted increased trade with China, said the agreement would be difficult to fulfill, noting that delivering 12 million metric tons of soybeans by early next year is “not very realistic.” 

As China establishes new trade routes across Latin America, every new port or shipping lane makes a future recovery for U.S. farmers more challenging.

Despite the tensions, Hemmes still views China as an essential market. 

“I don’t think our relationship with China has been damaged,” the Iowa soybean farmer said. “China is a low-cost buyer and will need soybeans from the U.S. for a long time. But we will never be their number one source.”

For her, the changing politics and policies have made the United States an “unreliable trading partner.”

“The only way that we become their top choice would be if our soybeans were far cheaper than South America’s.”

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.