Soybeans, Rice, Cotton and BRICS

Jun 04, 2025

By Mary Hightower

The global trading landscape is shifting as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — along with countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia — create their own trading bloc which will have implications for global competitiveness of soybeans, rice and cotton from the United States.

With the recent inclusion of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, what’s known BRICS+ aims to “leverage the increase in their combined gross domestic product, or GDP, and global share in commodity production and trade to reduce its reliance on the U.S. dollar,” said Ryan Loy, extension agricultural economist with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

“What those countries produce altogether accounts for about 25 percent of the global world output,” he said. “The combined GDP now is nearly exactly the same as that of the United States, which has really steadily lost GDP share since about 2000.”

Of particular interest to the U.S. and Arkansas is that the BRICS+ nations “combined currently produce about 44 percent of the world’s grain, 33 percent of the total wheat and rice exports in the world, and about 25 percent of the global corn exports,” Loy said.

“Currently, a significant portion of international debt instruments are issued in U.S. dollars and must be repaid in U.S. dollars, and a majority of global trades are settled in U.S. dollars,” Loy said. “What they’re trying to do is remove the U.S. dollar as the global standard and safe-haven currency.”

Source : uada.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