Wheat Trade: Exports to East Asia

Pinning down exactly how much Kansas wheat goes to Asia is difficult because wheat is a commodity, shipped in bulk. Wheat from Kansas is indistinguishable from Nebraska’s or Oklahoma’s once harvests are combined for shipment. It doesn’t come with a tag saying, “Grown in Kansas.”

But Kansas produces about 20 percent of the entire U.S. wheat crop, on average about 400 million bushels (over 10.8 million metric tons) a year, more than any other state (Access Kansas). Half of all that wheat is exported, and nearly 95 percent of exports are hard red winter wheat, though a growing percentage is the hard white winter wheat valued by many Asian noodle makers.

So it’s fair to say that, even though specific figures aren’t available, the state represents a significant presence in wheat exports.
The biggest Asian market is Japan, which imported over 3 million metric tons of U.S. wheat in 2004, nearly 56 % of Japan’s wheat imports for that year (Fukuda 14).
In the marketing year 2004/2005, China purchased over 2 million metric tons of wheat from the U.S., bringing this market up to second place for U.S. wheat in East Asia (Jiang and Gifford 14). This was a big change from the previous decade, during which China’s annual wheat imports had fallen dramatically to less than 1 million metric tons from over 12 million metric tons in 1995 and even higher levels in the late 1980s
Domestic production, however, has fallen recently and, as stockpiles shrink, China has finally returned to the wheat import market.
Predictions vary as to the future scale of China’s wheat imports. USDA forecasts total wheat imports to China for the marketing year 2005/2006 at 6 million metric tons (Jiang and Gifford 1).

“We can anticipate them being in the 3 million to 5 million range, year in year out” said John Oades, director of the West Coast Office of U.S. Wheat Associates, referring to the amount the United States and other countries will compete for “… though they’re not going to be the huge customer, the 15 million tons that they were 20 years ago.”

In contrast with the wide fluctuations in the China market, South Korea has consistently been the next largest customer in East Asia. South Korea imported 1.17 million metric tons of U.S. wheat in 2004, accounting for over 52 percent of Korea’s milling wheat imports for that year (Choi and Phillips 12). Following not far behind is Taiwan, which purchased 86%, or 935,000 metric tons, of its wheat imports for the marketing year 2003/2004 from the United States (Perng and Trachtenberg 3-4). Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have been steady customers for hard red winter wheat, which is good for baking but less suited for noodles.

Taiwan and South Korea have also imported hard white winter wheat from the United States. Hard white wheat is a growing part of the U.S. wheat industry, spurred on by market demands, especially the realization that Australia was taking market share. Though much of the rising U.S. hard white wheat crop is used domestically, exports have grown tremendously to 192,000 metric tons in the 2003/2004 marketing year, nearly 10 times the amount recorded for the year before (Lin and Vocke 14).