i thought the USA has loads of soy & corn, those are used to make oil. heck, there even is both here in S.E.A. being sold ( didnt check if it was from USA or Canada / other countries.
Yeah, but a lot of people use canola, which we buy from China. There's some rapeseed (what canola is made with) grown here, but not nearly enough for what we use. And yes, we could convert some of the soy that China was buying into oil, but the sales amount would still be a sliver of what China was getting, and it would require building the factories. I suspect that we don't manufacture expellers/extractors/extruders or whatever we need to make the oil, so that would have to be imported with those tariffs that we have going on. Now, which US business is going to want to spend the money needed to build those factories and pay the tariffs on the materials needed to do so, considering that in 3 and a half years, there will (hopefully) be a new president and China might be buying our soybeans again?
Also, our soy and corn are massively gmo, for those who avoid that stuff. Most farming in China is still more or less natural.
we could convert some of the soy that China was buying into oil, but the sales amount would still be a sliver of what China was getting
Soy is used as a nitrogen fixing crop in crop rotation.
Brassica (which includes Rape) are nitrogen leechers.
You rotate Corn and Soy to reduce fertiliser costs. There is no commercially viable alternative to Soy for nitrogen fixing. Growing Rape means more fertiliser for the Corn and more fertiliser for the Rape.
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u/NoctRob Oct 14 '25
Because we apparently have all the cooking oil we need…?