US Grains Council sees China as biggest corn importer

The US Grains Council said that China may soon become the world’s largest importer of corn, Bloomberg reported. “There is no doubt that China needs to buy a lot of corn,” said Rebecca Bratter, the council’s director of trade development. “It is not unreasonable to expect that in the next five years, China may be importing 15 million metric tons of corn.” The US Department of Agriculture has forecast that China’s imports of US corn will fall 1.3% this year to one million metric tons. Demand for imported corn has risen in China due to a combination of changing diets and poor domestic harvests in the past year.