CHOICES
A publication of AAEA
Soon after taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration launched a rapid-fire sequence of announcements of new tariffs on US imports. In addition to implementing an across-the-board 10% increase in US tariff rates, the administration undertook a staggered series of bilateral trade actions, among them the notorious “reciprocal” tariffs that enacted new country-specific duties on imports from 57 different countries. The various levies on imports from major US trading partners—including Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and others—were swiftly met by threats of commensurate retaliatory responses from many of the targeted countries. The chaotic sequence of tariffs and ensuing retaliatory threats stoked immediate fears over a redux of the trade wars of the first Trump administration. These fears were particularly acute regarding the potential ramifications for US agriculture, an industry that endured billions of dollars of export losses during the trade conflicts of 2018–2019 (Grant et al., 2021). The wider scope of the ongoing trade tensions has the potential to generate export losses from retaliation that surpass those from the trade disputes of the first Trump administration. Adding to the uncertainty impacting the US trade situation is the ongoing litigation over the reciprocal tariffs, as the legality of the statutory basis invoked by the Trump administration to impose the tariffs—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—will be evaluated by the Supreme Court in January 2026.
Within agriculture, few commodities have more at stake from the renewal of trade tensions than US row crops. Of the sector’s $165 billion in total revenues in 2023, which reflects the combined value of US production of cereal crops, fiber crops, and oilseeds (FAO, 2025), roughly $60 billion came from foreign exports, a sign of the outsized importance of international markets for the industry. International markets are the economic lifeblood of most row crop commodities (with exceptions such as corn, for which US domestic sales dwarf foreign exports), with exports accounting for 81% of total US sales for cotton, 79% for sorghum, 65% for soybeans, and 53% for wheat (FAO, 2025). While enduring, widespread retaliation to the US tariffs has largely failed to materialize (excepting China’s retaliatory tariff response), the trade-related headwinds created by the administration’s tariff actions threaten to compound the effects of other ongoing challenges facing the industry. Such challenges include a host of factors such as rising competition from export competitors like Brazil, high and rising input costs, and low commodity prices. Together, these and other challenges threaten the sector’s position as a global export leader (Ridley and Devadoss, 2025). As a result, and fearing the consequences of another trade war, industry groups such as the American Soybean Association and National Corn Growers Association have clamored for a swift end to the renewed trade hostilities (ASA, 2025; NCGA, 2025)
The Trump administration has frequently sought to use tariffs as leverage for extracting market access concessions from targeted countries. While preliminary frameworks for ad hoc bilateral trade deals have been announced in a handful of prominent cases, such as between the United States and the European Union or the United States and Japan, specifics about most of the deals remain scarce. Additionally, critical discrepancies in the announced content of the agreements as reported by US officials versus negotiating partners have raised questions about what exactly the United States and its trading partners have agreed to (Davis, 2025; Malmström, 2025). Many of the announced deals have specific provisions that facilitate expanded access for American agricultural products, such as Japan agreeing to possibly allocate a larger share to US rice imports within its tariff-rate quota scheme (Govella, 2025) or Bangladesh agreeing to undertake minimum purchases of US wheat for a period of 5 years (Ruma, 2025). In some cases, however, such as in the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Japan over access to Japan’s rice market, negotiators on the respective sides have made conflicting public statements about the specifics of the preliminary deals (Lee and Tanaka, 2025). Substantial hurdles thus remain to codifying the details that underpin the Trump administration’s handshake deals. For instance, the exact scope of the tentative US–EU agreement as pertaining to agricultural products remains to be finalized, and the completed agreement will require ratification by each EU member state, a questionable prospect given the sensitive nature of agriculture in trade negotiations. Other examples abound of deals whose substance amounts to bullet points describing aspirational outcomes to be realized from ongoing negotiations.
In this article, we describe the implications of the tariff actions undertaken by the Trump administration in its opening months. To this end, we elaborate on the implications of current trade conflicts and the potential impacts of several of the most prominent bilateral deals currently being negotiated with key trading partners for US row crop exports.
In response to the Trump administration’s cavalcade of new tariffs, many large US trading partners initially threatened to reciprocate with retaliatory measures of their own. In February 2025, the United States announced the imposition of tariffs on Canadian, Chinese, and Mexican exports related to grievances over drug trafficking and immigration (Bown, 2025, provides a detailed breakdown of the timeline of US tariff announcements). Canada’s government responded by outlining proposed retaliatory measures that would target $115 billion of US exports, including agricultural products such as fruits and vegetables, beef and pork, and dairy (US wheat, barley, and canola were also targeted, but corn and soybeans, the most valuable US–Canada row crop exports, were spared). Mexico’s government similarly announced plans to retaliate but did not specify which American products it would target, Mexican leadership’s aim being to pursue a conciliatory approach to resolving trade hostilities with the United States (Gillies and Sánchez, 2025).
As would become a recurring theme during its initial months, the Trump administration backed down from many of its threats after brief periods of negotiation. Mexico suspended its planned retaliation, and Canada’s retaliation ended up targeting a narrower range of goods than in its original announcement, many of which (such as dairy and poultry products) are thinly traded due to existing Canadian import barriers. The European Union followed a similar course in response to planned US tariffs on EU exports announced in April, with the bloc announcing, but then quickly withdrawing, its own retaliatory measures against the United States. US officials have consistently postponed the implementation of many of the announced bilateral tariffs, though the country-specific reciprocal tariffs revealed earlier in the year finally entered into force in modified form on August 7.
A key exception to the pattern of announced but later suspended retaliation has been the case of China, which in early April met US tariffs with its own retaliatory duties of 125%. In the ensuing months, China lowered its initially prohibitive duties to 20% or 25% depending on the product. Given its position as the largest destination for US row crop exports (driven in large part by the massive volumes of US–China soybean exports), China’s retaliation has dire implications for the industry. As we discuss further below, US–China exports of major row crops such as soybeans, cotton, and sorghum effectively collapsed as of late 2025 (though it is worth noting that US exports to non-China destinations of commodities such as corn have remained robust). Consequently, and regardless of the ultimate success of ongoing negotiations, the renewed trade tensions seem poised to further contribute to the fraying of trade relations between the world’s two largest economies.
Recent history provides a glimpse of the possible outcomes for the industry, even if a deal with China is secured. The Phase One deal signed in January 2020, which paused the first US–China trade war of 2018–2019, led to an increase in China’s imports of US farm products. The nadir in US exports during the trade war and the ensuing increase that followed the truce are shown in Figure 1, which depicts monthly US–China exports of major row crops from 2018 to mid-2025. However, the uptick resulting from the Phase One deal has not endured. For each of the depicted commodities, the initially large expansion in exports was later revealed to be a mirage, with exports of commodities such as corn all but evaporating in more recent years (an outcome to which China’s large, recent domestic corn crops have contributed). One of the lingering consequences of the first US–China trade war has been China’s growing reliance on Brazil and other non-US agricultural exporters for its commodity imports, particularly soybeans, corn, and cotton (Dhoubhadel, Ridley, and Devadoss, 2023; Ridley and Devadoss, 2023), each of which is a cornerstone US export commodity.
Despite the steady erosion in US–China trade relations, China remains a vital foreign market for US row crops. Data from the US International Trade Commission reports that China absorbed $12.6 billion of US soybean exports (51.5% of the US total), $1.5 billion of cotton exports (29.7%), $1.2 billion of sorghum exports (86.1%), and $484.8 million of wheat exports (8.2%) in 2024 (USITC, 2025). However, as Figure 1 depicts, the ongoing trade tensions have already had a dramatic negative impact on US–China exports, with trade volumes falling far below their levels of prior years. Total US–China corn and soybean exports for January through July 2025 totaled $3.1 million and $2.5 billion, respectively; for comparison, the value of US–China corn and soybean exports for the same half-year interval averaged $1.6 billion and $4.4 billion, respectively, over the 2020–2024 period. Similar collapses in half-year exports across the two periods of comparison are evident for cotton ($150.0 million in 2025 versus $1.1 billion in 2024–2025) and sorghum ($24.2 million versus $783.7 million). For wheat (not depicted in the figure), zero US exports to China were recorded in the first half of 2025 but averaged $435.3 million in January-to-June exports over 2020–2024.
Some glimmers of hope in US–China trade relations were provided in early November when China pledged to buy 12 million metric tons of US soybeans by the end of the year and a further 25 million metric tons of purchases to take place in 2026. Whether the conclusion of a trade truce between the two countries will resuscitate US–China agricultural exports remains to be seen, but both the short- and long-run dynamics of trade between the two countries paint a dire picture. Even when (and if) a settlement emerges between the two countries, the other deals struck thus far by the Trump administration suggest that a large portion of the existing tariffs will be left in place. As in the first US–China trade war, a possible outcome of negotiations will be the establishment of temporary new minimum purchase agreements on China’s part. Nonetheless, and as the above figures show, temporary purchase commitmentsdo not necessarily translate to enduring export gains. Should the worst come to pass for US–China exports, the United States may want to seek out alternative export markets. However, very few trade partners have the same capacity to absorb US agricultural exports in the way that the Chinese market can, and efforts to secure new trade deals with other large trading partners remain in preliminary stages.
One of the primary hopes of the Trump administration and US commodity groups is that potential new trade deals with countries targeted by US tariffs will help achieve expanded access to foreign markets. As discussed above, the status of these negotiations continues to evolve on a near-daily basis, and even in the cases for which tentative agreements have been announced, many important details remain to be finalized. Furthermore, as details of the tentative new trade deals gradually emerge, some observers have assessed that their actual substance lies far from US officials’ announcements of the initial details of the deals. Some commentators have noted that the fledgling agreements typically consist of nonbinding, aspirational language in place of concrete commitments, such as “the United States and the European Union intend to work together to address non-tariff barriers affecting trade in food and agricultural products” (Karma, 2025, emphasis original). The current trade policy landscape thus remains pervaded by uncertainty, making it difficult to generate precise forecasts on the possible consequences for US row crop exports of ongoing trade negotiations.
Below, we describe the status of current negotiations with selected major export destinations for US row crops. While other deals have been announced and the administration claims that negotiations remain ongoing with a number of major US trading partners, we highlight the cases that we do because of the countries’ large export potential and prominence as negotiating targets (India and the United Kingdom) or their sizable existing trade in row crops with the United States (Japan). However, the conclusions that we draw from these examples readily extend to the ongoing bilateral negotiations with other trade partners. For each trade partner, we list the value of US row crop exports (the combined value of cereal, oilseed, and cotton exports) as of 2024.
India has long been viewed as a promising export opportunity for US agriculture, given its population of more than 1.5 billion and its high barriers to trade, particularly for agricultural products (Choi et al., 2025). However, the country’s export potential for US agriculture has largely remained untapped: US–India row crop exports are paltry relative to the size of the two countries, with the vast majority ($209.0 million) accounted for by cotton exports. Consequently, some of the Trump administration’s earliest trade policy maneuvers focused on securing expanded market access for US farm products in the world’s most populous country. Negotiating objectives of particular interest for the US row crop sector include the easing of India’s trade restrictions on fuel ethanol and genetically modified (GM) corn and soybeans.
Despite these objectives and initial optimism on both sides, trade relations between the two countries have soured. In July, the administration announced new 25% duties on Indian exports over grievances relating to several of India’s barriers to agricultural trade, which were soon raised to 50% because of India’s continuing purchases of Russian oil. In August, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described Indian negotiators as “recalcitrant,” and President Trump declared that trade negotiations would remain on hold until the US grievances that inspired the tariffs were addressed. The intensifying trade tensions between the two countries suggest that a trade deal remains distant.
Like India, the United Kingdom has long been upheld as an export market with significant potential for US agriculture. Trade in row crops between the United States and the United Kingdom has remained comparatively limited, as tariff and nontariff barriers, along with the United Kingdom’s well-established trade relations with the European Union, inhibit US exporters’ access to the British market. One of the earliest negotiating successes claimed by the Trump administration was therefore the “Economic Prosperity Deal” reached with the United Kingdom in May. President Trump proclaimed at a White House event announcing the deal that it would “dramatically increase access for American beef, ethanol, and virtually all of the products produced by our great farmers” (White House, 2025).
However, even with the tentative deal in place, market access issues for US row crop commodities remain. Restrictions on GM imports, a perennial sticking point in US–EU and US–UK trade relations, remain in place. Moreover, the agreement does not address the United Kingdom’s existing barriers to imports of hormone-treated beef, which have indirect implications for demand for corn and soybeans as feed. Consequently, and as with the US–EU deal and other preliminary bilateral negotiating frameworks, most of the agreement’s specifics remain to be determined. The fact that most of the particulars of the deal have yet to be finalized, namely, the tariff treatment of products besides the ones explicitly mentioned in the agreement’s announcement, leaves open the question of whether the deal will yield meaningful trade benefits for the US row crop sector.
Japan is one of the largest destinations for US row crops, and a partial agreement (the US–Japan Trade Agreement, or USJTA) was inked during the first Trump administration and entered into force in 2020. The USJTA liberalized many of Japan’s restrictive trade barriers facing American products such as barley, corn, and wheat, and the agreement ultimately led to 90% of US exports of food and agricultural products entering the Japanese market duty free or under preferential tariff rates. Japanese officials were surprised, then, when the country’s exports were hit by 24% duties under the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariff announcement in April. The ensuing trade talks between the two countries were marked by confusion and conflicting statements from both sides about specifics in the agreed-upon content of the deal under negotiation (Kihara, 2025).
A tentative agreement between the two countries was reached in July; however, as with the US–EU and US–UK agreements, most of the specifics remain to be ironed out in later negotiations. President Trump declaimed in a July social media post that “perhaps most importantly, Japan will open their Country to Trade including… Rice and certain other Agricultural Products [sic]” (Maher and Buchwald, 2025). However, Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s trade negotiator, was less exuberant in describing the agreement’s implications for agricultural trade. Akazawa indicated that the share of American rice imports within Japan’s tariff-rate quota may increase under the current agricultural trade framework, while underscoring that the agreement would “not sacrifice Japanese agriculture” (Maher and Buchwald, 2025). Emblematic of the other tentative agreements negotiated by the administration, the lack of specifics and concrete commitments suggests that the deal’s impacts on US row crop exports will conceivably be limited.
As in previous bouts of US protectionism, internationally exposed sectors such as agriculture have much to lose from reprisals by trade partners and tit-for-tat retaliatory spirals. Past trade conflicts have clearly demonstrated what is at stake, as trade partners readily target export-reliant and politically sensitive commodities such as row crops to inflict the greatest possible political and economic damage. Thus, even as the Trump administration wields tariffs as a tool for securing market access concessions from trade partners, it is essential to note the very real downsides of this approach. It is equally important to note that the ramifications of such an approach to trade negotiations extend far beyond the immediate impacts from retaliation. A volatile trade policy environment creates heightened uncertainty for both exporters and importers, which has undeniable negative consequences for US agriculture (Gopinath, 2021). Additionally, the use of coercion and threats to achieve trade policy objectives can lead to the United States being seen as an unreliable trade partner (Luckstead and Devadoss, 2025). The consequences of such an erosion of trust are plainly evident from the steady decoupling of US–China trade relations that resulted from the first US–China trade war.
All told, the trade policy situation facing the US row crop sector, and US agriculture more broadly, remains highly fluid. Answers to the questions of whether the retaliatory responses incurred by US tariffs will widen in scope, or whether the ongoing negotiations being pursued by the Trump administration will yield substantive results, have yet to be revealed. Nonetheless, the latest batch of trade disputes has already had impactful consequences for US row crops, with exports to China falling off dramatically throughout 2025. Any new purchase commitments or arrangements to expand market access with other trade partners that will potentially be realized from pending trade deals will need to be substantial—more substantial than what the preliminary deals negotiated thus far seem poised to deliver—to make up for the export losses that have already manifested.
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