China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) announced a massive 55-percent tariff on beef imports from Brazil, which is nominally a partner in the China-dominated BRICS economic bloc.
MOFCOM said the tariff was imposed because Brazilian beef had reached 100 percent of its import quote under China’s “beef safeguard measure.”
Although its name implies some sort of health and safety legislation, the “beef Ssafeguard measure” is a nakedly protectionist scheme that was announced in 2025, took effect on January 1, 2026, and will last until December 31, 2028. The policy was explicitly intended to protect Chinese agribusiness from foreign competition by setting a quote for how much beef every other country is allowed to export to China.
MOFCOM made a show of cutting “developing nations” some slack by offering up to a one-year grace period when the “beef safeguard measure” was announced in 2025 but, in the event, Brazil was given no such lenient treatment. The higher tariff rate kicked in precisely three days after Brazil hit its cap of 1.1 million metric tons of beef exports to China.
China was already collecting a 12-percent import tariff on Brazilian beef, so the effective new tariff rate will be 67 percent. Analysts expected the tariff to shave ten percent off Brazil’s beef exports to China, its top customer. While China imposed import caps on all of its foreign beef suppliers, no other country was hit as hard as Brazil.
Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inacio da Silva said last week that he would get around China’s import cap by borrowing some of the export capacity that went unused by Uruguay.
Uruguay was reportedly amenable to the deal, which Lula discussed with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last week. Orsi said Uruguay has not used 80,000 tons of its 331,000 ton import quota for China.
China evidently refused to authorize the Uruguay-Brazil swap, and seems unwilling to allow any such trades on its per-country import caps.
Brazil was already facing an import ban from the European Union (EU) over the use of antimicrobial drugs in its beef, plus higher tariffs from the United States under President Donald Trump.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that China renewed import licenses for over 400 American meat plants in May, after Trump met with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing, which suggests a fair bit of Brazil’s meat market in China has been shifted to the United States.
Lula has yet to raise any loud objections to the rough treatment from his Chinese Communist senior partners in BRICS. The SCMP quoted Brazilian Agriculture Minister Andrew de Paula saying that his country was holding “no new negotiations with China over a bigger quota, or on using volumes assigned to other countries.”
