Impact of Natural Disasters on China's Soybean Imports
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China faces severe soybean supply shortages and extreme dependence on international markets with high uncertainty, which could sow food security risks. Some major soybean-producing countries in the United States and Brazil dominate the large global soybean exporters. China is the world's largest soybean importer, and its imports heavily depend on a few countries. As a result, extreme weather, natural disasters, and economic and trade frictions faced by the major source countries of soybean can affect China's soybean industry and increase import uncertainty. The United States and Brazil are the main countries with which China has significant soybean trade relations (Wang et al., 2023). To assess the impacts of extreme weather disasters on China's soybean trade, the panel fixed effects and Poisson Pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) approach was used to explore the impact of extreme weather disasters on China's soybean imports from 2003-2021 in terms of the number of disasters and types of disasters in China's major soybean importing countries by combining a gravity model with soybean planting season disaster data. Covariates also include gross domestic product (GDP), tariffs, distance, soybean production, the 2008 global food crisis, and the 2018 U.S.-China trade war. The results of the targeted scenario analysis indicate that (1) for every 1% increase in the number of extreme weather events in the U.S. and Brazil, China's soybean imports decreased by 0.013% and 0.035%, respectively; (2) when the two external shocks occur simultaneously, a downward trend in China's soybean imports is evident; and (3) weather disaster in China during the soybean planting season will stimulate an increase in domestic demand leading to an upward in soybean imports.