Around 84% of domestic soybean consumption in China depends on imports and more than half of this supply comes from Brazil Bloomberg via Getty Images/BBC In just over two decades, China went from a secondary partner to the main destination for Brazilian exports, driving a succession of record sales for national agribusiness. In 2025 alone, Brazil earned US$100 billion from the Chinese market — more than from any other country in the world. The pace remains strong in 2026. From January to June, Brazilian sales to the Chinese market reached US$58.322 billion, a growth of 21.9% compared to the same period of the previous year, according to consolidated data released by the Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce and Services (MDIC). In the same period, exports to the United States fell 13%, a loss of US$2.6 billion, after Donald Trump's government imposed 50% tariffs on some Brazilian products in 2025. On Wednesday (22/7), a new additional tariff of 25% came into force, increasing the pressure for Brazil to find other destinations for the affected products. But the trade barriers being imposed by Trump could also accelerate a broader shift in global agricultural trade. A report published on Tuesday (21/7) in the British Financial Times, one of the world's two main financial newspapers, states that the USA is at risk of losing its position as the world's largest agricultural exporter to Brazil. According to the US Department of Agriculture and the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, the US exported US$171 billion in agricultural products last year, just US$2 billion more than Brazil. In 2021, this difference was US$56 billion. Analysts interviewed by the newspaper point out that one of the main factors behind this advance was the trade war started by Donald Trump, mainly against China. Since his first term, when tariffs were imposed on the Asian country in 2018, Beijing has significantly reduced purchases of American agricultural products and increased its imports from countries like Brazil. This scenario reinforces, in the short term, the importance of the Chinese market to offset losses in other trading partners. But while Brazil turns to China as part of its diversification strategy, Beijing is working to reduce the very external dependence that helped transform the country into an agricultural powerhouse. "China has identified that being highly exposed to imports is an element of vulnerability for a country with such a large population and is therefore promoting structural change", says Larissa Wachholz, coordinator of the Asia Program and the China Analysis Group at Cebri (Brazilian Center for International Relations) and former special advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture. This change appears explicitly in China's recently released 15th National Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). The document elevated food security to the status of a national strategic priority and established goals to expand domestic grain production, increase self-sufficiency in agricultural seeds, accelerate the use of artificial intelligence in the field and develop new sources of protein. "Obviously, China will not give up on Brazilian soybean exports in any visible period of time, but it will begin to depend on these imports to an increasingly lesser extent, because it is seriously investing in technologies to replace these vegetable proteins with industrial amino acids and other forms of protein production for animal consumption", says senior professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo Ricardo Abramovay. The warning is supported by projections from the China's Food Future report, by consultancy Systemiq, according to which Chinese soy imports could fall by around 25% by 2030 — a reduction equivalent to approximately 23.5 million tons. Among the factors highlighted are improvements in animal nutrition, productivity gains and the advancement of proteins produced by new industrial processes. The study highlights technologies such as precision fermentation, biomanufacturing and lab-grown meat, methods that can reduce the need for soy intended for conventional animal protein production. "This idea that Brazilian soy production is extremely important for feeding the world is a fiction. We don't feed people, we feed animals", says Abramovay. Issue of national security China's transformation into an economic power was accompanied by an equally profound change in the way its population eats. Since the beginning of the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved out of poverty and into the middle class. With more disposable income, the country's diet underwent rapid diversification: the consumption of meat, milk, eggs and processed foods grew rapidly. This change had direct effects on global food trade. To produce more sources of protein, China needed to greatly expand the supply of animal feed — one of whose main inputs is soybeans. It was this growing demand that helped transform Brazil into one of the Asian country's main agricultural suppliers. This is because Chinese territory faces structural limitations in expanding its agricultural production: the country is home to around a fifth of the world's population, but has less than 10% of the planet's arable land and around 6% of global water resources. Thus, for decades, Beijing's solution was to combine domestic production with increasing imports of food and agricultural inputs. This model made it possible to sustain the expansion of consumption without requiring the country to produce internally everything its population demanded. Now, however, the same external dependence that helped drive its growth