From Infrastructure Investment to Expanded Market Access: China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and the Implications for U.S. Trade Policy

Mar 10, 2026

By Gerald Mashange

China’s economic relationship with Africa has expanded greatly since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. After becoming Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009, China’s total trade with Africa rose from $198.5 billion in 2012 to $295.6 billion in 2024 (see China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation Report, August 2013; Communiqué, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China, June 2025). By comparison, total U.S. trade with Africa amounted to $104.9 billion in 2024 (see Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Africa).

In 2025, total trade between China and Africa rose by 17.7% to $348.05 billion, primarily driven by a 25.8% increase in exports from China, while imports from Africa rose by 5.4% (see China Global South Project). However, this trade expansion coincided with a major shift in U.S. foreign policy. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order requiring U.S. foreign assistance to be reevaluated and realigned with his administration’s priorities, and on January 27, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget directed agencies to pause and review a broad set of financial-assistance programs (see Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid; see OMB Memorandum M-25-13). By March 2025, roughly 83 percent of programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had been canceled, sharply reducing the institutional footprint of U.S. development engagement abroad, including in Africa (see Reuters, March 10, 2025).

In today’s farmdoc daily article, we examine how China’s Belt and Road Initiative has expanded Beijing’s economic presence in Africa through infrastructure and related investments. However, the U.S. has an initiative of its own, known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which provides eligible sub-Saharan African countries with duty-free access to the U.S. market for more than 1,800 products. Although President Trump signed legislation on February 3, 2026, reauthorizing AGOA (with retroactive effect to September 30, 2025), the program is scheduled to expire at the end of this year, leaving its longer-term future uncertain (see Statement from Ambassador Jamieson Greer).

Source : illinois.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids