Source: Danny Ding, NCDA&CS, 5/18/21

I have clearly felt China’s attitude and positive actions to improve China-US relations, especially economic and trade cooperation recently. Both Ministries and provincial level government authorities started to organize dozens of US-China trade and investment promotion focused events. We have also identified some new Chinese buyers for NC ag and food products from recent events. I look forward to a very fruitful year in the rest of 2021.

Here are a few notable activities and statistics from China:
• Global economy is expected to grow by 5.4% in 2021, which is an increase from the 4.7% predicted by the UN at the beginning of 2021. Among them, the report raised China's economic growth forecast from 7.2% in early 2021 to 8.2%, and the U.S. economic growth forecast from 3.4% to 6.2%.
• So far this year, China has imported more corn than ever before. The import volume reached 6.73 million metric tons in the first quarter, an increase of more than 400% over the same period in 2020.
• Due to changes in the timber trade policies of Australia and Russia, by 2022, it is estimated that China will have a gap of 8.66 million cubic meters of logs, just from the perspective of coniferous log import.
• In April, Chinese consumer prices rose by 0.9% year-on-year, of which food prices fell by 0.7%. In terms of food, the prices of aquatic products, eggs and fresh fruits have risen significantly, while the prices of livestock and meat have fallen by 10.3%, especially the price of pork has fallen by 21.4%.