Experts told the House Ag Committee China remains the top global threat to U.S. agriculture despite billions in U.S. export sales there.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem says China wants to control the US food supply.
“They have, decades ago, started buying our fertilizer companies. Then, I watched them buy up our chemical companies. I watched us as we sold citizenship to members of the Communist Party for investment into our processing systems, and now most of our processing facilities are owned by the Communist Party or Chinese Government. Now they are coming for our land.”
House CCP Select Committee Chair Mike Gallagher says U.S. tracking of farmland buys, even near sensitive military installations, is flawed.
“The U.S. government has no way of tracking land purchases by foreign adversaries. There was a recent GAO report that found USDA is incapable of properly tracking such land purchases by problematic actors. Second, even upon discovering a problematic transaction, CFIUS often finds it has no jurisdiction.”
He’s referring to the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. with a new seat Congress just okayed for USDA. But there’s a national security balancing act with China. American Soybean Association President Josh Gackel on the 2018 tariff war.
“We saw almost an immediate drop in the market price for soybeans, in particular, close to a two-dollar drop in just a short time after those tariffs were announced and the retaliation from China.”
But Indiana farmer and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Kip Tom says from seeds to data, China’s already undermining the U.S. farmer.
“The constellation of satellites that are operating their tractors to communicating data algorithms to the computers in the tractor to the seeding, these have all been compromised—they’ve been stolen.”
Tom says the Chinese now have our seed genetics and will boost corn yield by some ten percent this year, further displacing U.S. sales and prompting his call for more research dollars and the best cybersecurity experts in the field.
-NAFB