Truck driver Marion Howard watches soy beans load into his truck on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2017, at Chris Crosskno's farm near Denton, Mo. J.B. Forbes | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | TNS | Getty Images

After the U.S. and China announced the "phase-one" trade agreement, a critical point remains in question: agricultural purchases. Bilateral trade is a significant part of the dispute between the world's two largest economies, especially after both sides decided to break the negotiations into phases, rather than tackling a slew of American concerns, which range from the trade deficit in goods to state control in the economy. On Friday, both countries held separate press conferences to announce that they reached the phase-one agreement.

President Donald Trump said the Chinese would buy $50 billion in agricultural purchases "pretty soon." More specifically, Reuters reported that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told reporters that China would buy at least $16 billion more agricultural goods in each of the next two years. The report said that could bring total purchases to near $50 billion in 2020 and 2021. "That scale of purchases seems implausible and Chinese officials were reluctant to mention any specific target during their press conference," Nomura analysts, including chief China economist Ting Lu, said in a note released Saturday, Beijing time. Trade between the U.S. and China has fallen as both sides applied tariffs on billions of dollars' worth of goods from the other. In 2018, China ranked fifth of top destinations for U.S. agricultural exports at $9.2 billion, down from second place a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service. In an encouraging first step, the U.S. held off raising tariffs on Chinese goods on Sunday, and Beijing did not go ahead with planned retaliatory tariffs. China has also been increasing its purchases of American soybeans this year, despite an overall expected decline in Chinese demand for the product, according to the U.S. Soybean Export Council. Chinese stocks traded mildly lower Monday, following a muted U.S. stock market response to news of the trade agreement on Friday.