The Trump Administration plans to give farmers another $16 billion in aid to help compensate for losses caused by the trade war with China, reports Bloomberg News.

The president was meeting with farm leaders at the White House Thursday afternoon to outline the plan.

Earlier, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue offered details about the plan in an interview Thursday morning on the Fox Business Network.

Not all the money will go directly to farmers, Perdue said.

“Some of this $16 billion dollars is going to be used for market access programs to go and build markets elsewhere,” he said. “And if China decides not to play then we will sell these great products elsewhere.”

Perdue added that he hopes China will return to the negotiating table, but that doesn’t appear likely any time soon.

“American farmers are struggling to remain afloat as the tit-for-tat tariffs spat with China leaves soybeans from last year’s harvest piling up. For Trump, appeasing his rural-voter base has become crucial ahead of the 2020 elections,” Bloomberg says.

After the Perdue interview on Fox, soybean futures fell.

At least one prominent agriculture executive says farmers don’t really want aid — they want trade.

China has long been the biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans: it imported more than $12 billion worth in 2017. But since Trump launched the trade war, soybean exports to China have fallen more than 80 percent; Brazil and Argentina are supplying the rest.

An Agriculture Department spokesman told Fox Business that the new aid program “is being designed to avoid skewing planting decisions one way or another. Farmers should continue to make their planting and production decisions with the current market signals in mind,” rather than trying to guess if or when normal trade with China might resume.

Beth Ford, CEO of Minnesota-based agriculture cooperative Land O’Lakes Inc., told Bloomberg that so far, dairy farmers have lost hundreds of millions of dollars to the trade war, despite earlier aid payments.

She declined to comment on the second-round aid package announced by Perdue.