A breakthrough in agricultural sector brinkmanship was announced during President Donald Trump’s recent highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea. China, which had been boycotting American soybeans as part of a trade standoff, agreed to resume purchases from our farmers—and even committed to buying 25 million metric tons annually in each of the next three years as part of a negotiated trade deal. This was coupled with an end to retaliatory tariffs on a variety of other U.S. agricultural products.
While this trade war announcement is welcome news to American farmers, the preceding pause in soybean purchases is but one visible aspect of a larger strategy by the Chinese to insert themselves into our agricultural sector by undermining American producer independence, extracting industry trade secrets, and manipulating markets.
The America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) groundbreaking new research paper on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in American agriculture lays bare a variety of largely unpublicized aspects of this more clandestine economic war. Foremost is its highlighting of Syngenta, a Swiss-based crop protection, biotechnology, and seed company that is owned by ChemChina, a state-owned enterprise (SOE) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In 2021, ChemChina merged with SinoChem, another PRC SOE, making it the world’s largest agricultural chemical and seed supplier.
In my role as the Health ad Harvest Campaign Director at AFPI, I regularly meet with farmers and ranchers who rely heavily on Syngenta pesticides, seed treatments, and other biological controls. They are unaware that they are beholden to a CCP SOE for their crops’ health. Relying upon a foreign adversary-controlled enterprise to ensure that our agricultural products make it to market conflicts with the image of the rugged individualism of the American farmer. And yet, our farmers, who value their independence, don’t want this to be the case. When they come to understand the true story behind Syngenta’s ownership, they know and appreciate the risk that this poses to our food supply.
Imagine the economic damage that could be done if these products became unavailable or their chemical formulations were altered or otherwise manipulated to undermine American agricultural production. This is not hyperbole: Syngenta and other CCP-owned companies have established, through acquisitions, a variety of corporations at key strategic chokepoints in the agricultural supply chain. Those corporations, via undisclosed divestments to subsidiaries, then regularly lobby the U.S. government to further create reliance and enmesh themselves in multiple sectors of our agricultural industry, all while failing to register as foreign entities.
Beyond the reliance upon the CCP for crop inputs and their integrity comes the risk to our privacy in allowing these corporate arrangements to persist. In 2017, the CCP required that Chinese companies comply with the dictates of their state security and intelligence agencies and in 2020 mandated that SOEs share data with those agencies. This means CCP SOEs operating on U.S. soil may be sharing aerial imagery data from agricultural drones as well as proprietary information on farming operations and American harvests via a variety of software tools, drones, and other autonomous hardware marketed to farmers.
This data-sharing extends to intellectual property violations, a longstanding CCP practice of acquiring proprietary design and production information via leverage over American companies gained through ownership stakes, technology sharing agreements, or via import requirements. The prime example is Smithfield foods, a longtime pork producer and processer in Virginia that was acquired in 2013 (along with 400 company-owned farms) by the PRC-based WH Group and which controls one-quarter of U.S. pork production.
The Chinese people’s growing appetite for pork has meant that the PRC has been working to develop its own domestic pork production industry via gleaning trade secrets from the American pork industry. Data sharing, per PRC law, is to “benefit the advance of economic… development” in the PRC. The acquisition of Smithfield furthers those goals by exfiltrating industry knowhow from our agricultural innovators to the PRC.
This broader strategy of opportunistic exploitation in the service of domestic growth entails market shocks for our farmers, as in the case of the now-ended soybean boycott. As the CCP undertakes a massive expansion of Chinese-owned soybean and grain production in South America to feed their growing pork and protein production industry at home, it comes at the expense of American exports. As PRC production increases, its reliance on American production decreases, but not before our production methods have also been exported.
Agricultural interference by the CCP comes at the expense of our hardworking American farmers and ranchers, and at the risk of our national and food security. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recognizing this threat, has developed a National Farm Security Action Plan which the AFPI report highlights as a top priority to help address the CCP’s meddling.
To further address this threat and ensure that other foreign adversaries don’t likewise gain leverage over our food supply, federal policymakers should enact the report’s comprehensive set of solutions, including a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of the past approvals given to PRC SOEs and a broadening of Foreign Agent Registration Act registration requirements. At the state level, state policymakers should prohibit foreign adversary ownership of American farmland, particularly near sensitive sites.
When asked by the farmers and ranchers that I meet with about how CCP agricultural interference could have become so pervasive, I share that collectively, we weren’t paying attention. The time to overlook this risk has long since passed and this administration recognizes that. This paper shed much needed sunlight on a critical national and food security risk and directs attention where it belongs.
Matt Schmid is the Director of the Health & Harvest Campaign at the America First Policy Institute.
