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BEIJING: US protectionism is undermining agricultural cooperation with China, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington said, warning that farmers should not bear the price of the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

“It goes without saying that protectionism is rampant, casting a shadow over China-US agricultural cooperation,” said Xie Feng, according to the transcript of a speech published by the Chinese embassy on Saturday.

Agriculture has emerged as a major point of contention between China and the US as the superpowers are locked in a tariff war launched by President Donald Trump.

China in March slapped levies of up to 15 percent on $21 billion worth of American agricultural and food products in retaliation for sweeping US tariffs. Washington and Beijing this month extended a truce for 90 days, staving off triple-digit duties on each other’s goods.

US agricultural exports to China fell 53 percent in the first half of the year from the same period in 2024, with a 51 percent decline in soybeans, Xie said in the speech to a soybean industry event in Washington on Friday.

“American farmers, like their Chinese counterparts, are hardworking and humble,” Xie said. “Agriculture should not be hijacked by politics, and farmers should not be made to pay the price of a trade war.”

The envoy said agriculture is a promising area of cooperation and a “pillar of bilateral relations.” China has a comparative advantage in labor-intensive products, while the US excels in land-intensive bulk commodities through mechanized, large-scale production, he said.

Last month US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Washington would curb farmland purchases by “foreign adversaries,” including China.

The Department of Agriculture said it had fired 70 foreign contract researchers after a national security review intended to secure the US food supply from adversaries including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Xie dismissed the US concerns. “Chinese investors hold less than 0.03 percent of US agricultural land, so where does the claim of ‘threatening US food security’ even come from,” he said, calling the US restrictions a “political manipulation.”

US soybean exporters risk missing out on billions of dollars worth of sales to China this year as trade talks drag on and buyers in the top oilseed importer lock in cargoes from Brazil for shipment during the key US marketing season, traders say.

PARIS: Irish rap group Kneecap, one of whose members faces a British terror charge for allegedly supporting Hezbollah, are to perform outside Paris on Sunday, despite objections from French Jewish groups and government officials.

The local authorities have also withdrawn their subsidies for the music festival where the trio will play — the annual Rock en Seine festival, held in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud — after organizers kept the controversial band on the program for their slot from 1630 GMT.

Strongly backing the Palestinian cause and bitterly criticizing Israel, the group from Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, have turned concerts into political events.

Liam O’Hanna, 27, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, was charged in England in May accused of displaying a flag of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah during a London concert in November.

They played a closely scrutinized concert at the Glastonbury Festival in June, where Chara declared: “Israel are war criminals.”

The group later missed playing at the Sziget Festival in Budapest after being barred from entering the country by the Hungarian authorities, a close ally of Israel.

Kneecap, who also focus on Irish republicanism, are controversial within the UK and Ireland, more than two-and-a-half-decades after the peace agreement that aimed to end the conflict over the status of Northern Ireland.

The group takes its name from the deliberate shooting of the limbs, known as “kneecapping,” carried out by Irish Republicans as punishment attacks during the decades of unrest.



“We are confident that the group will perform in the correct manner,” Matthieu Ducos, director of Rock en Seine, told AFP ahead of the festival.

The municipality of Saint-Cloud for the first time withdrew its 40,000-euro ($47,000) subsidy from Rock en Seine.

The wider Ile-de-France region that includes Paris also canceled its funding for the 2025 edition.

However, such moves do not jeopardize the viability of the festival, whose budget was between 16 million and 17 million euros this year.

The group has already played twice in France this summer — at the Eurockeennes festival in Belfort and the Cabaret Vert in Charleville-Mezieres — both times without incident.

But the concert comes against a background of concerns about alleged high levels of antisemitism in France in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel and the devastating assault on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip that Israel launched in response.

“They are desecrating the memory of the 50 French victims of Hamas on October 7, as well as all the French victims of Hezbollah,” said Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), calling for the concert to be canceled.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said vigilance would be required against “any comments of an antisemitic nature, apology for terrorism or incitement to hatred” at the event.