China: Buy local to skip foreign food Trump told to act on China firms

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Beijing, Aug. 7: China stressed the importance of keeping the people’s “rice bowl” filled with domestically grown grain at a time when available farmland is shrinking, the weather’s turning more extreme and imports are cheaper.

"If you have enough grain, you don’t need to panic,” agriculture minister Han Changfu wrote in an opinion piece in the People’s Daily on Friday. “Chinese people’s rice bowls must always be held firmly in our own hands, and should be full mainly of Chinese grain.”

The country buys hefty amounts of soybeans, corn, cotton and pork from the US, and the comments come as tensions escalate with Washington over everything from cyber security to Hong Kong. US President Donald Trump has signed executive orders prohibiting American residents from doing business with the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps beginning 45 days from now.

China, the biggest consumer of agricultural commodities, should always be self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while maintaining an “appropriate volume” of imports, Han said. The minister’s opinion piece appears about a week before a review of the phase-one trade deal with the US. While China has committed to honouring the agreement, purchases of farm products during the first half of the year were only about 20 per cent of the target. — Bloomberg

Washington, Aug. 7: Trump administration officials have urged the President to delist Chinese companies that trade on US exchanges and fail to meet U.S. auditing requirements by January 2022, Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury officials said on Thursday.

The remarks came after US President Donald Trump tasked a group of key advisers, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, with drafting a report with recommendations to protect US investors from Chinese companies whose audit documents have long been kept from US regulators.

It also comes amid growing pressure from Congress to crack down on Chinese companies that avail themselves of US capital markets but do not comply with US rules faced by American rivals.

“We are simply leveling the playing field, holding Chinese firms listed in the US to the same standards as everyone else,” a US Treasury official told reporters in a briefing call about the report.

The Trump administration’s recommendations, if implemented via an SEC rule-making process, would give Chinese companies already listed in the United States until January 1, 2022, to ensure the US auditing watchdog, known as the PCAOB, has access to their audit documents.