U.S. and Taiwan begin trade conversations

Jun 06, 2022

Agriculture is among the topics the two sides will discuss

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

The United States is engaging in trade discussions with a country left out of the US-Indo Pacific trade deal.

The U.S. and Taiwan announced the launch of the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21^st-Century Trade on June 1.

This after Taiwan wasn’t included in the regional trade deal which includes countries like Australia, India, Japan and New Zealand.

Agriculture will be part of these bilateral trade talks.

“The United States and Taiwan intend to explore provisions to facilitate agricultural trade through science and risk-based decision making and through the adoption of sound, transparent regulatory practices,” the June 1 announcement says.

Taiwan is already in the top 10 for U.S. ag exports.

The country ranked sixth among U.S. ag export markets in 2021, the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service says.

Taiwan imported $3.94 billion of U.S. ag goods last year.

The top item exported to Taiwan was soybeans.

The U.S. exported 1.4 million metric tons of soybeans to Taiwan in 2021, worth $735.67 million.

Rounding out the top three is beef with 63.09 million metric tons exported worth $668.04 million. And corn, with 1.58 million metric tons exported worth $434.55 million.

Taiwan charges an average tariff of 15.06 percent on agricultural goods.

But the country’s government has lowered tariffs recently to help its people.

In February it removed the 5 per cent business tax on imported corn, soybeans and wheat, halved tariffs on butter, powdered milk and milk fat. It also extended its tariff reductions on beef and wheat.

Those extensions on beef and wheat expired at the end of April.

This relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan has caused China to get involved.

Chinese officials want these trade talks to stop.

These discussions “disrupt peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, the Associated Press reported.

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.