China's retaliatory tariff on US Animal Feed exports

This page documents a removal rather than a tariff. The zero percent figure recorded against US animal feed and the soybeans that anchor it reflects China’s decision to withdraw a retaliatory charge it had previously imposed — an unusual and important entry in a landscape otherwise dominated by escalation. Understanding it requires the full sequence, because the headline number on its own is misleading.

Through most of 2025, China applied retaliatory duties in the range of roughly ten to fifteen percent on a basket of US farm exports including soybeans, sorghum, and pork, classified across agricultural headings such as 1201.90 for soybeans. These were among the most economically consequential of all the counter-measures, because the United States is a dominant supplier of feed grains and oilseeds and China is the largest single buyer of US soybeans. A surcharge on that flow reverberated through American farm income and grain-handling logistics far more broadly than a charge on any single manufactured good.

On November 5, 2025, China’s State Council Tariff Commission announced that those retaliatory agricultural duties would be removed, with the withdrawal taking effect on November 10. That is the event this page records: the rate is zero because the prior surcharge was lifted, not because feed grain was never targeted. The removal is verified through the ITA Foreign Retaliations Database, which tracks both impositions and withdrawals, and is attributed to the Tariff Commission announcement of early November 2025.

For a US grain or oilseed exporter, the practical reading is cautiously positive but conditional. The withdrawal restores duty-free access for the affected feed and oilseed lines as recorded, which materially improves the competitive position of US soybeans against South American origins in the Chinese market. But the agricultural file has proven the most politically reactive of any in the bilateral relationship, swinging with the broader state of trade negotiations, and a removal can be reversed as quickly as it was granted. An exporter should not treat the zero rate as a settled baseline; the prudent step is to confirm the live status against the database immediately before pricing a cargo and to build tariff-reversion language into forward contracts that extend beyond the current negotiating window.

In short, the zero recorded here is the trace of a retaliation that came and went. It belongs on a retaliation page precisely because the withdrawal is itself a retaliation-policy event, and because the underlying exposure — one of the largest agricultural trade flows on earth — could be re-targeted if relations sour again.

See also: China tariff overview, Animal Feed, and China’s full retaliation list.