USDA’s most recent World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates projects Chinese beginning stockpiles of soybeans for the 2018/19 marketing year at 825 million bushels--approximately 70 percent of the volume of U.S. soybean shipments to China during all of the 2017/18 marketing year. With large inventories on hand in China, it’s no surprise U.S. soybean exports to that country are down to start the 2018/19 marketing year. Way down.
 
USDA’s Federal Grain Inspection Service reveals that through the first seven weeks of the 2018/19 marketing year, 7.4 million bushels of new-crop U.S. soybeans have been shipped to China, down 97 percent from prior-year levels. Through the first seven weeks of the previous marketing year, the U.S. shipped 239 million bushels of soybeans to China, and during that same period in the 2016/17 marketing year the U.S. shipped 211 million bushels.
 
The retaliatory tariffs of 28 percent on U.S.-sourced soybeans have resulted in a sharp decline in China’s purchases. Shipments of soybeans to China have fallen by 98 percent along the Mississippi River, 95 percent out of the Columbia River and by 91 percent from the Puget Sound. Shippers in the Interior, South Atlantic and East Gulf regions have yet to make a soybean shipment to China.
 
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