BEIJING — As Brazil takes a greater share of Chinese soybean purchases away from American farmers, the U.S. is trying to win back buyers by emphasizing crop quality.

“Soybean production in North America and soybean production in South America is very different,” Carlos Salinas, executive director, East Asia, at the U.S. Soybean Export Council said in a presentation Tuesday at the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing.

He compared a range of weather factors between a city in Brazil and one in the U.S. state of Illinois, such as rainfall in the 30 days ahead of harvest: 231 millimeters versus 72 mm.

“That impacts crop condition. That impacts quality,” he said.

The half-day event for “advancing a sustainable and resilient U.S.-China soybean supply chain” was co-organized with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

“What we really encourage buyers in soy to do is to make sure they’re educating themselves on this to go deeper,” Jim Sutter, CEO of the U.S. Soybean Export Council told CNBC on the sidelines of the event, noting new ways to measure quality and nutrition, especially for animal feed.

American soybeans have become a bargaining chip in the escalation of U.S.-China trade tensions over the last several years. Beijing, the world’s largest soybean importer, has also diversified its sourcing to Brazil and Argentina in an effort to ensure food security.

While the U.S. and Brazil each accounted for around 40% of China’s soybean imports a decade ago, Brazil started to take a far larger share in 2018 after the first round of U.S. tariffs on China, according CNBC calculations of Chinese customs data accessed through Wind Information.

As of the first five months of 2026, more than 60% of China’s soybean imports came from Brazil, 23% from the U.S. and 10% from Argentina, the data showed.

U.S. soybean exports to China plunged 76% last year to $3.1 billion, down sharply from a peak of $17.9 billion in 2022, according to official U.S. figures. At 7.37 million metric tons, U.S. soybeans remained the largest American agricultural export to China during the last calendar year.

Convincing Chinese buyers to ramp up purchases will take time.

Last month, the White House said China would buy at least $17 billion of U.S. agricultural goods annually through 2028, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. That amount would be “in addition to the soybean purchase commitments that it made in October 2025.”

After a Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea last fall, the U.S. said China agreed to buy at least 25 million metric tons of American soybeans in each of the following three years.

China has bought all 12 million metric tons of American soybeans that it agreed to purchase in the marketing year ending August 2026, and…

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Tuesday told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the deadline for China to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans from American farmers was not the end of December as the White House has said, but the end of the “growing season.”

Greer’s comment at the hearing came on the heels of a report by NBC News showing that the pace of China’s purchase of soybeans in recent weeks, after a months-long boycott of buying, was well short of reaching 12 million metric tons by the end of the year.

China to date has bought only about 3 million metric tons, the trade representative told members of the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies subcommittee.

He said there was a “discrepancy” in what the White House has described as the deadline and the actual deadline for the purchases to be completed.

Greer’s disclosure came in response to a question by Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.

“There remains anxiety about if and when China will fully follow through on those purchase commitments that were made,” Fischer said.

She noted that the White House fact sheet on the trade deal said China would purchase 12 million metric tons by the end of the calendar year — contradicting recent comments from Greer.

“It is for this growing season, so, thank you for highlighting that,” Greer said.

‘”We’ve heard from a couple farmers, they wanted to know about that discrepancy, and it is a discrepancy, it’s through the growing season,” he said.

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After President Donald Trump‘s recent meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, there is hope for U.S. farmers that the soybean business may be on the way back.

At the China International Import Expo last week, Illinois soybean farmer Scott Gaffner said he came to Shanghai to save his China business.

“We want to make sure that our soybeans are getting exported to China because it’s a very important market to us,” Gaffner, who is a member of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told CNBC.

He said the Gaffner Family Farm typically sells 40% of its annual soybean exports to China, but as he arrived in Shanghai, that number this year was zero.

As part of the trade arrangement discussed between Trump and Xi in the South Korean port city of Busan at the end of October, China lifted retaliatory tariffs on some agricultural products. But it has maintained a 13% tariff on U.S. soybeans.

The White House said China will buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans by the end of this year and 25 million for each of the next three years.

That’s still down from the nearly 27 million metric tons China bought in 2024. The country has yet to confirm the Trump administration’s numbers.

“We’d like to have just kind of a continuation of smooth sailing,” said Jim Sutter, CEO of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, at his group’s booth at the expo. “Do I think that’s realistic? I don’t know. These are two big, powerful countries, a lot of issues.”

Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, told CNBC last week that the U.S. and China have stabilized the relationship for now, but “structural differences remain.”

Uncertainty is typical of the relationship between the two economic powers, but the negotiation around soybean purchases this time around is playing out more urgently than Trump’s first term, as China has been diversifying away from U.S. supply.

Even before the trade war, the Chinese were buying more from other countries like Brazil and Argentina, and as tensions built, Beijing specifically stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans to pressure Trump.

The move caused major financial problems for American farmers like Gaffner.

“Normally, whenever we are combining the soybeans, we’re going take them right to the river, down the river to Louisiana and then ship out to China,” Gaffner said. “But with China not buying any soybeans, we’re taking them right to our bins, and we’re storing them in our bins.”

Gaffner is still optimistic.

Towards the end of his trip, he got a call that his farm had sold one shipment of soybeans.

“We like no trade war, because hopefully that levels the playing field,” he said. “We just want to do business.”