/Reuters Agency
At least two ships moved to the grain port terminals near New Orleans to load U.S. soybeans and a third was said to be en route to Texas to load sorghum, which will be the first operation of this kind since mid-March 2025. The final destinations of the vessels are ports in China, according to an operations schedule reviewed by Reuters.
U.S. grain farmers and traders have been waiting for the resumption of shipments to the Asian country, after Beijing rejected U.S. crops for months due to a trade war with Washington, which cost U.S. farmers billions in lost trade.
China has reserved nearly 2 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans and a smaller volume of wheat since a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea in late October, when the White House claimed that Beijing had agreed to buy 12 million tons of soybeans before the end of the year.
The Asian nation has not confirmed the agreement and doubts about it, or about when the shipments would take place, have fueled uncertainty in the grain markets.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, recently reported that the Trump Administration hopes to sign an agreement within two weeks.
The vessel Ocean Harvest is scheduled to arrive this week at the Cargill terminal in Reserve, Louisiana, while the vessel Tokugawa is scheduled to arrive at a terminal in Convent, Louisiana, owned by Zen-Noh Grain, both to be loaded with U.S. soybeans, according to the shipping schedule.
A third vessel, the Bungo Queen, is scheduled to arrive next week to load U.S. sorghum at the Archer-Daniels-Midland terminal in Corpus Christi, Texas.
