After a year’s silence, China has resumed wheat and sorghum shipments from the United States in a significant trade-patching move.
Following a 12 million-tonne soybean import deal for 2025, Beijing now promises to buy 120,000 tonnes of soft and spring wheat.
The last official wheat trade between the two took place in October 2024, per Reuters. This was after a glut 2024-25 wheat season in China that discouraged imports.
Beijing had also gone on to impose additional tariffs of 15% on U.S.’ wheat on March 20, 2025.
As America’s biggest buyer of cereals, China relentlessly slapped retaliatory duty on key grains as a bargaining tool.
With trade back, two shipments of soft white wheat and spring wheat will depart the U.S.’ shores by December 2025.
Buys 86% of New World Crop
At the same time the announcement for wheat import resumption came up, officials also mentioned oncoming orders of sorghum.
Before China stopped orders in late 2024, it used to buy 72 to 86% of the federal sorghum exports. The total shipments there reached 5.6 million tonnes in the 2023-24 timeline.
Tim Lust, chief executive at the National Sorghum Producers cited an aim to secure a yearly import average of 5 million tonnes.
“These exports are vital,” said Lust, adding that farmers and the industry would find stability with trade reinstatement.
The absence of the grain in recent bilateral trade followed a 10% additional sorghum tariff that Beijing imposed in March 2025.
Trade resumption is good news for China, too, because its 2025-26 sorghum utility will probably jump by approximately 50% year-on-year.
But it is farmers in the American Sorghum Belt who will benefit the most. Due to surplus, they were already selling their sorghum below production costs, at $2.35 a bushel early November. As the stats below indicate, the market performance of sorghum and wheat in the United States pegs to China’s record purchases.
United States-China Sorghum and Wheat Trade Statistics
Sino-American wheat and sorghum trade is extremely lucrative at peak years. In 2024, China bought $560 million of wheat from the U.S., fourth only to Mexico, the Philippines and Japan, per the OEC. Sorghum exports to China in 2024 also topped at 5.6 million tonnes. Between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. apportioned 86% of sorghum exports to China, a portion that hit 93% in 2018 alone. China also imports the bulk of its foreign sorghum from the U.S.: between 2019 and 2023, it imported 72% of its sorghum needs from the United States.
How did sorghum and wheat trade perform in 2025 during reciprocal tariffs?
Between October 2024 and early November 2025, wheat imports by China from the U.S. slashed by 70% due to tariffs. In March 2025, Beijing announced an additional 15% wheat tariff. Besides, 2024 was a productive year in China itself when wheat output rose to 140.1 million tonnes, further cutting imports. The same was true of sorghum, with U.S.-origin purchases dropping by 97% in the year ending October 2025.
How much sorghum does the U.S. harvest?
Sorghum production in the U.S. would hit 9.94 million tonnes in 2025-26, per the Southern AG Today, quoting the USDA. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS), the country would supply 50% of the world’s sorghum trade in the 2024-25 period.