India Could Fill Gap in Agricultural Imports Amid China-U.S. Trade War

Posted by Matt Hopkins|25 September 2018

The ongoing China-U.S. trade dispute will provide a chance for China and India to strengthen their agricultural trade, which will help to address the trade imbalance between the two countries, experts said on Tuesday and reported by Xie Jun on Global Times. But they cautioned that the high price of India’s farming products is still a major obstacle.

The Indian government is currently making an effort to promote sales of agricultural goods to potential Chinese buyers, according to information sent by the Embassy of India in China to the Global Times on Tuesday.

“It’s very likely that China will turn to India as a replacement market as the Sino-US trade war worsens,” Zhao Gancheng, director of the South Asia Studies Department at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The Indian government is anxious to further unlock the Chinese market, and it has been pushing the Chinese government to drop a seven-year-long ban on rapeseed meal imports, a Times of India report noted on Friday. The report also said that India is hoping to take advantage of the China-U.S. trade war by exporting more soybean produce to China.