Zhai Tianchang et al.: The Share Effect of China-Latin America Agricultural Cooperation and the Reconstruction of Price Transmission Mechanism-Expanding the Diversification Path of China's Soybean Imports

Zhai Tianchang Lin Ling Hu Glacier

institute of Rural Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

abstract

under the background of the intensification of the game between big powers and the deep reconstruction of the global agricultural supply chain, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to scientifically evaluate whether the import diversification strategy can really weaken the dependence on a single supplier country, which is of great theoretical and practical significance to ensure China's food security. This paper focuses on the representative product of China-Latin America and China-US agricultural trade-soybeans, combined with the trade data from 2013-2024, from the two dimensions of share substitution and price transmission, to empirically test the mechanism and effectiveness of the deepening cooperation between China and Latin America to promote the diversification of China's soybean import sources under the Sino-US trade friction. The study found that Latin America's import share substitution elasticity relative to U.S. soybeans experienced a three-stage evolution of "jump, adjustment and convergence" after 2018, with an overall significant improvement. Along with this, as Latin America's import share rose to a dominant position, soybean pricing shifted from "US-led" to "mixed Latin American and US-led", effectively weakening the impact of US price shocks on the Chinese market. This change is fundamentally supported by the cumulative effect of China-Latin America cooperation, which keeps the new equilibrium relatively stable under multiple external disturbances. At the same time, the ecological red line for the protection of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest is tightening day by day, and the traditional mode of deforestation and expansion is unsustainable, which restricts the space for further improvement of production capacity. Therefore, in the future, China-Latin America agricultural cooperation should be promoted from extensive expansion to green technology-driven transformation, and the "technology-enabling system adaptation" model should be extended to the global food and agriculture governance system, so as to provide a replicable Chinese solution for developing countries to reduce the risk of supply chain concentration through South-South cooperation.

From: Price Theory and Practice 2026 No. 4, pp. 92-99.