His company, New Hope Liuhe is the largest buyer of soybeans in China and Forbes puts his family net worth (his daughter runs the feed operation) at $8.4 billion. We last saw him in May 2018's "It appears China has stopped buying soybeans from the US altogether because of trade fight":
..."China Pig Feed King Says U.S. Trade War Will Hurt":
..."In case of a trade war, we are able to find other solutions," said Liu, who is also chairman of New Hope Liuhe, a publicly traded animal feed producer controlled by New Hope Group. “We have to raise pigs, and citizens have to eat pork.”...And from the South China Morning Post, March 4:
New Hope Group chairman calls for central government subsidies to upgrade agriculture sector
The Chinese government needs to improve its fiscal and industry policies to protect domestic producers expected to be squeezed by higher imports of US agricultural products, according to agribusiness tycoon Liu Yonghao.
“More imports of soybeans and corn will help reduce the cost of raising livestock, but Chinese farmers, and the animal feed industry in China will definitely be under pressure,” Liu said on the sidelines of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on Sunday. “Agriculture in the United States is much more efficient than in China and they will have the upper hand.”
Liu, the 67-year-old billionaire chairman of China’s New Hope Group and a CPPCC member, runs the country’s biggest agriculture conglomerate. Each year, the company produces around 20 million tonnes of animal feed and processes 1.3 billion chickens and eight million pigs, according to its website.His comments echo concerns about whether China can maintain a balanced farming structure to ensure food security as it prepares to buy more American farm products as part of concessions to end the country’s long-running trade war with the United States.
Related:In a meeting late last month, Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He and US President Donald Trump agreed that China would buy an extra 10 million tonnes of US soybeans. China has also proposed buying an additional US$30 billion a year of US agricultural products including soybeans, corn and wheat, on top of pre-trade war levels, Bloomberg reported.This was reflected in the central government’s first policy statement of the year, in which it called for greater and more diverse imports of agricultural products.“More imports will bring both opportunities and challenges,” Liu said. “But in short term, the agriculture industry in China will be under relatively big pressure … We have no idea how this [more imports] will last, the government must have tried a lot to protect our own system.”He said the government could offer farmers and companies more subsidies to help them upgrade production.But subsidies are a vexed issue, with the
that China exceeded internationally agreed-upon standards for domestic support of rice and wheat farmers, allowing Chinese farmers to artificially deflate prices of the crops around the world....MORE
Nov. 2018
Pork: "Chinese-owned Smithfield to get cash from bailout program spurred by China's tariffs"
