(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump has extended a 90-day tariff pause on China.
With only hours until the temporary agreement’s Aug. 12 deadline, Trump signed an executive order to allow the United States and China to continue trade negotiations.
Since a two-day meeting in Stockholm between the world’s two largest economies in late July, both sides have floated the idea of extending the deal to allow for further talks.
Earlier in the day, Trump did not say whether he would approve a 90-day extension to the U.S.–China tariff pause, potentially leaving the door open for tariffs to return to near-embargo levels.
“We’ll see what happens,” the president told reporters at an Aug. 11 press briefing.
“We’ve been dealing very nicely with China. As you have probably heard, they have tremendous tariffs that they’re paying to the United States of America.”
The United States and China engaged in near-embargo tariffs earlier this year. The United States imposed 145 percent levies on Chinese goods entering the country, while Beijing countered with 125 percent retaliatory tariffs. Since then, the current U.S. administration has lowered its rate to 30 percent, while China has reduced it to 10 percent.
An extension into the fall could allow for a meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trump has also denied pursuing a summit with Xi, writing on Truth Social that he is “not seeking anything.”
“I may go to China, but it would only be at the invitation of President Xi, which has been extended. Otherwise, no interest!” the U.S. president said in a July 28 post.
It comes shortly after he confirmed that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia would be charged a 15 percent fee on revenues for artificial intelligence (AI) chip sales to China. Estimates suggest the U.S. government could collect approximately $2.2 billion from the sales.
The announcement did little to lift U.S. stocks as the leading benchmark indexes remained in the red. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 0.4 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index and broader S&P 500 dipped 0.1 percent.
All About Soybeans
The next trade deal, meanwhile, could be contingent on soybeans, similar to what occurred during the Phase One trade negotiations during Trump’s first term.
Writing in an Aug. 10 Truth Social post, the president said he hopes Beijing will expand its purchases of U.S. soybeans.
“China is worried about its shortage of soybeans. Our great farmers produce the most robust soybeans,” Trump said. “I hope China will quickly quadruple its soybean orders. This is also a way of substantially reducing China’s trade deficit with the USA. Rapid service will be provided.”
Beijing, as part of a key provision in the 2020 trade deal, committed to buying $32 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products over two years, including immense volumes of soybeans. While the pact did not specify the exact amount of soybeans, U.S. officials say China’s purchases fell short of broader targets.
While it is the largest customer of U.S. soybeans—China bought $12.64 billion from the United States last year—the country’s purchases have declined since peaking in 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture. The European Union and Mexico are the second- and third-largest importers, with totals of $2.45 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively.
China is the world’s largest soybean importer, accounting for almost two-thirds of global imports, data from the International Food Policy Research Institute show.
Prices for soybeans surged during the Aug. 11 trading session following the president’s social media post. November soybean futures rallied 2.3 percent, or $0.2275, to $10.1025 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.
What White House Has Said
U.S. officials have pursued aggressive trade negotiations aimed at rebalancing the global economic dynamic. Trump and his team are attempting to position the United States to reclaim its role as a leading manufacturer, while encouraging China to shift from a dominant exporter to a more consumption-driven economy.
The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $295.5 billion last year, up 5.7 percent from 2023, according to the Trade Representative’s Office.
New Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers indicate that the U.S. trade deficit with China decreased to $9.4 billion in June, down from $13.94 billion in May.
Last month, a U.S. delegation led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met with their Chinese counterparts in Stockholm for two days. At a post-meeting press conference, Bessent and Greer suggested a 90-day extension was on the table, but it would be up to the president to decide.
Still, Bessent said he was optimistic that Washington and Beijing were inching closer to a trade agreement.
“I believe that we have the makings of a deal,” Bessent said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on July 31.
“There’s still a few technical details to be worked out on the Chinese side … I’m confident that it will be done, but it’s not 100 percent done,” Bessent said.
However, according to the president, additional tariffs could be implemented on China.
“It may happen … I can’t tell you yet,” Trump told reporters at an Aug. 6 press briefing. “We did it with India. We’re doing it probably with a couple of others. One of them could be China.”
The White House recently imposed an extra 25 percent levy on Indian imports entering the United States, bringing the total tariff rate to 50 percent.
Trump alluded to India’s hefty purchases of Russian oil as a reason for the punitive tariffs that he says are “fueling the war machine” in Ukraine.
As of Aug. 7, the current overall average effective tariff rate is 18.6 percent, the highest since 1933, according to The Yale Budget Lab.
Recent Daily Treasury Statement figures reveal that the U.S. government has generated more than $154 billion in tariff income fiscal year to date.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.