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Nov. 16, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:32
The Chinese Threat to America’s Food Supply: Kip Tom
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Time Text
Any nation that's not food secure is only three meals from chaos.
Nearly 70% of these crop care products or pesticides are produced in India and China, mainly in China.
All of a sudden, what happens if they want to hit the kill switch?
Kip Tom is an Indiana farmer and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies for food and agriculture.
We had Chinese nationals that were coming out at night digging up the pure parent lines of the seed that we was producing on our farm, only to be taken to Chicago here, put in a warehouse, and then shipped back to China.
We have to protect that intellectual property.
In this episode, he breaks down key vulnerabilities in America's food systems.
And how the Chinese regime is exploiting them.
Syngenta is a chemical and sea giant around the world.
The reality is, now the Chinese own it.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanye Kialik.
Kim Tom, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's an honor to be with you today.
We've been talking a lot about how communist China is an existential threat to America.
We don't often think about it through the lens of food.
And you've been in the thick of this.
So tell me that picture, please.
You know, oftentimes I think we think that existential threat is something maybe that's military or some other component of the way the Chinese try to gain more control of the world, but the reality is food security is our national security.
Any nation that's not food secure is only three meals from chaos.
So I've had an extreme focus during my tenure serving as the ambassador to the Rome-based UN food and ag agencies where I work globally.
And I saw firsthand how the Chinese are trying to upend the world order, but then the threat they pose to U.S. agriculture and us being a global leader in providing foods and feedstuffs to the world.
Before we jump into the U.S. side, obviously the U.S. plays a huge role in those organizations and the FAO and so forth.
How deeply is China integrated into that?
Today, actually, the Chinese control mainly almost half.
They're the largest leader in a lot of those different organizations at the UN. So when we look at what's going on in the food and agriculture organization, we know that Kyu Dongzhu was elected there back in 2019.
We know that under his leadership, obviously, the tune and the focus of the FAO organization has changed significantly.
We'd be in FAO conferences and we would hear these These taglines of win-win and hand-in-hand, and it was usually the setup to where they wanted to use our money, our expertise, our intellectual property to try to improve food security in places that would benefit China and China solely.
Not an African nation, not the U.S., not anybody else.
It was always about them.
And I think the Chinese are very focused on trying to capture the largest amount of heritable land, and that is on the continent of Africa.
I think oftentimes we think that the Chinese are there for the mineral or the mining that can be taking place to get the critical elements that they need to build batteries or whatever it is, but the reality is they're there for their land mass.
They're there for the ability to produce enough food to feed their own people, to be self-reliant.
And so anything that we would do with FAO, anything we would do in Africa, we have to realize how much of this is actually benefiting China and not the nation that we're going in intending to help and support the local people.
So, you know, we often hear about the Chinese regime basically buying different companies.
A notable one was Smithfields.
I mean, Hugh, right?
Largest pork producer in America.
I guess the first question is, how is it possible that that even happened?
Well, I'm not sure it would even happen today, whether it was Smithfield or whether it's Syngenta.
The reality is, let's talk about Smithfield a little bit first.
So the reason why that the Chinese Communist Party had such great interest in acquiring Smithfield was, They have a hog herd that's nearly ten times the size of that in the United States.
It's hard to imagine, but it's ten times.
But the reality is it was typically production that took place in everybody's backyard.
They had hogs there.
It was a great background for where diseases would spread.
Productivity was low.
It was very dysfunctional in terms of producing the amount of pork that the Chinese people wanted to consume.
So the Chinese government figured out, well, if we want to get to where we need to be, let's go buy a company and we'll see how they process, package, produce, transport, move it on into food retail and how they get it done there.
Well, now that they've owned them for over well over 10 years, they've done it.
Now you see these pork complexes throughout China.
They call them condominiums.
Some of them, you know, maybe 10-story buildings where they start feeding the pigs at the very top and at the bottom they're going out for processing.
But they've consolidated, they've industrialized that complex, and the only way they could get that done was collecting the intellectual property from Smithfield of just how they produced, processed, packaged, transported, and sold to the consumer.
That's why that happened there.
Now Syngenta is a little bit different.
Obviously, we know that Syngenta is a chemical and seed giant around the world.
There was a number of companies bidding to purchase them back probably seven, eight, nine years ago.
None of them were successful in either Europe or the United States in acquiring them, so the Chinese Communist Party bought them.
They produce chemistries, they produce seed genetics, and all the more reason why China would want to acquire them is obviously they needed to improve their chemistries that they use to control weeds and insects and diseases, but they also need to improve their genetics.
They grow much more corn, more wheat, soybeans than we do, but this gives them the ability to build up their own production on their own shores.
Now, they still have restrictions in water, but the reality is if they can just produce 10% more corn, as an example, on their existing acres, They no longer need Brazil.
They no longer need the United States.
So this is something they acquired, but it was U.S. Technologies that developed a lot of these GM products and some of these chemistries.
But the reality is now the Chinese own it.
But they've been trying to do an IPO for a number of years, but have been unsuccessful in doing so.
So I look for them to continue to be owned by the Chinese Communist Party and continue to do what they do.
Let's talk about Syngenta because you're of course a prominent Indiana farmer.
What are the implications of this Chinese regime controlled company operating here with the chemistries and the seed banks and so forth?
Yeah, so I'm a little bit torn on that.
When I look at a company like Syngenta, I've got good friends that work there.
They're leaders in the industry.
They're in it for the right reason.
They want to support American values, but unfortunately they're working for Syngenta.
But they are protecting and making sure the U.S. is protected, but at the same time they have to protect the interests of the owner of Syngenta, which is the Chinese Communist Party.
So in the U.S., we still see them doing research.
We see them doing a lot of work where they're doing breeding on U.S. soil.
And you can build and understand the case where they're actually advancing some genetics here in the United States.
But it's not going to benefit us solely.
It's probably going to benefit us maybe a little bit, but it's going to benefit the Chinese Communist Party more.
Because this is where they're at already.
This is research that could probably take place somewhere else.
I get very suspect when I look at companies like Fu Fang, who is wanting to build a plant, I believe it was in North Dakota, near one of our military installations.
We can't take anything for granted with the Chinese, their ability to collect information, disseminate that information, and use it against us in the future.
Very much against allowing too much manufacturing or any manufacturing, especially around military bases, but anywhere in the country, actually.
Explain to me that national security dimension from your vantage point.
Well, I think we have to understand that we tend to think that the Chinese will operate us with a layer of trust like we trust other individuals, other companies, and protecting intellectual property.
They have no interest in protecting our intellectual property.
You know, we had a situation on our farm and other farms throughout the Midwest where we were producing seeds, in our case for a buyer.
And we had Chinese nationals that were coming out at night digging up the pure parent lines of the seed that we was producing on our farm.
Only to be taken to Chicago O'Hare, put it in a warehouse, and then shipped back to China.
They think that's perfectly fine.
Well, it's not fine.
There's, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars going to research and develop these new products, and then to produce and take it to the marketplace, but yet the Chinese captured that, the value of that, and stole it from the United States.
That's just one of many examples of How you can look at how the Chinese, once they're here, once they have their people here, how they can collect information.
And it spans all the way to our digital tools that we use on our farms where they've tried to steal our trade secrets or intellectual property that they've created on our own farms.
It's our own data that they've tried to attempt to take back to China to improve their productivity.
So, I mean, these are just your personal experiences here you're talking about, right?
A couple of examples.
That's remarkable.
You know, so those are a few examples that we know of and that the individuals have been caught, prosecuted, and some have served their time.
But how many didn't we catch?
And, you know, as even on this TV show here, I tell people, remember, they're watching.
They know what we're saying here today, and they will continue to up their game to make sure they can capture our intellectual property.
We say this oftentimes, the U.S. innovates, China replicates, and the EU regulates.
I want to make sure that we protect that intellectual property so we in the United States can take the value that's created from the development of that intellectual property and reinvest in developing new innovations.
We can't sit still.
Our world will not be fed.
The challenges we face if we cannot control that intellectual property and collect the value that's there and reinvest in developing and research and development, We won't be successful in the future, so we have to protect that intellectual property.
We're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Kip Tom, Indiana farmer and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture.
One of the things you've talked about in the past is different creative means of basically tapping into this IP. And I'm wondering if you have some other examples that you came across in your tenure or in your work?
Well, we know there's genetics, there's our crop care products that they have tried to copy.
A lot of people refer to them as pesticides or chemicals.
We may innovate a new product, we may produce it here for a while, but then all of a sudden the Chinese start producing it.
They highly subsidize the production of it and then they sell it back into the U.S. market.
It could maybe offer a discount to a farmer to buy that Chinese product for a fourth or 40% less than what he would pay from the U.S. manufacturer.
Well, how long can we keep going with wheels of innovation if we continue to push the manufacturing offshore?
The other risk we have there is if nearly 70% of these crop care products or pesticides are produced in India and China, mainly in China, all of a sudden what happens if they want to hit the kill switch?
Think about the productivity loss that will occur right here in the United States.
It would be not uncommon to believe that we would reduce productivity by 50% if we could not protect our crops.
China has the ability to do that today.
And this is where I think we really need to look at our regulatory regime here in the United States and how we can bring some of those critical supply chains, those building blocks for food, back to the United States or back to our allies around the world and make sure that we can create the jobs here, the productions here where we can control it, and make sure that we can be our food security, which protects our national security.
I mean, this is fascinating because you often hear how the U.S. can be easily self-sufficient when it comes to food.
This is one of the huge strengths that the U.S. has, in fact, because China cannot, for example.
But you're telling me that there's actually a food security issue on the China side.
That's not obvious to people, I think, to us.
No, I don't think most consumers around the U.S. understand the threat that we are under.
You know, I don't care if it's from animal proteins, you know, beef, pork, poultry.
I don't care if it's the crops we grow anywhere from rice to cranberries to corn to soybeans.
There all is a linkage back to China in certain components that's used to produce those crops or those animals that is a threat.
And I think we need to pay particular attention to it.
We actually need a U.S. agriculture strategy to understand how we can bring these components back and make sure that we're food secure.
You know, you only have to go back in time, back to the Dust Bowl, 1928, the Great Depression.
We had people spending 40 to 50 percent of their income on food.
Our country was food insecure at that point in time.
People were actually starving in the United States.
And then as we started to mechanize our farms, as we started to bring the green revolution, we started to produce advanced seed genetics, agronomic practices improved, and then we had the digital revolution that's occurring in agriculture today that is really rapidly changing the way in our productivity.
So, we need to make sure we do that so we don't get back to 1928.
I share this story and it comes from my heart because my father passed away about two and a half years ago.
Shortly before he passed, we went down to the first farm where he walked behind his father in the furrow and watched his father plow with horses.
It's the same farm that I walked in a furrow and saw my father plow with a tractor.
And my father looked at me and he said, what was our yield on this farm this year?
I said, well, I'm going to ask you the question first.
What was the yield when you were a boy?
He said, 30 bushels per acre of corn.
I said, well, this year it yielded 240 bushel per acre.
Think about that.
That eight-fold increase, that came from American innovation.
That came from, you know, advancements in agronomy, genetics, our crop care products and knowledge, our ability to make sure that we were food secure.
It's happening in other crops too, but the reality is we need to protect that because we don't keep up that same rate.
We won't be able to feed a world population of 9 or 10 billion people, so we have to do it today.
Tell me a little bit about your background.
You started here, so tell me more.
Yeah, certainly.
So our family came to the United States back in the late 1600s, both sides from Switzerland.
We landed in Philadelphia and actually lived down in Virginia for a while.
But we fought in the Revolutionary War.
We fought in the Civil War.
We fought in World War I and World War II. During that time frame we made our way from the east coast and by wagon with nine children on and made it to northern Indiana where it's home today has been since 1837.
I'm the seventh generation farmer there.
My children are running it that are eighth generation of course and I have two grandchildren just graduated from Purdue University that they'll be the ninth that they choose to come back to the farm with their agriculture degree.
During that time frame, I look at those productivity increases.
I look for the hardships that they had to live through during that time frame.
But today, I look at our agriculture then.
I look where it's at now and our ability to protect the environment, our ability to protect Earth, the climate, our productivity gains.
We've done a lot, but we don't talk about it often.
Tell me a little bit about the corn seed that you sell and why the Chinese nationals you describe might be so interested in that.
What is it about this corn seed that makes it so valuable to them in your mind?
Well, it's obviously, what's so valuable to them is the increased productivity, the yields you can get from it.
But, you know, I don't want to get too down in the weeds here, but we will take a version which we call the female and the male version and we'll grow them together in a field and we create a hybrid.
But when we plant them, they are still inbred parent lines, and so it can take 10, 12 years to produce some of these inbreds or to insert the genes into them that you need to protect them against insects or some weeds or some disease.
So there's a lot of value there, and I think it's very attractive and very easy.
It's not like we have security fences around all our fields to protect them, but they're very permissible, and they've been able to come in and dig up these seeds and start from scratch and produce it themselves.
I guess this is what I'm trying to do.
It took you 12 years to breed this specific line, and so this is the IP. This is your intellectual property that's being stolen.
Yes, it is.
Whether it would be the intellectual property of Bayer or Corteva, some of the major producers of the seeds, they're the ones that do all the breeding.
They scan and analyze millions of different varieties every year.
It's just not random where they go to the shelf and pull a couple off and say, let's try this.
They actually catalog and can screen a lot of varieties.
And that comes at a huge expense.
Some of these companies are spending upwards of $4 to $5 million a day.
Trying to discover new genetics and making sure that they're increasing productivity.
But we look forward to the time where we're producing seed genetics that may have a nutraceutical component to it for consumer health.
We look for others that maybe have a better attribute for livestock or maybe something for the biofuel sector.
There's a lot of work that continually goes on in the seed industry, but it's probably advanced U.S. agriculture more than anything else.
And that genetics also plays over into the livestock or the protein sector, whether it's pork or cattle or chickens, the way we can advance them to be more efficient.
You know, we want to use less fuel.
We want to use less chemicals.
We want to increase productivity and make sure that we're doing what's right for the environment.
So how much of a hold over U.S. ag does the Chinese regime have right now?
I don't know if you can give me some kind of a picture, some kind of measure.
Yeah, to say what they have hold over, I would say my earlier comments of where nearly 70% of our crop care products, pesticides or chemicals if you want to call them, are produced abroad, most of that in China.
That's a big hold.
We see some of our computer chips that run equipment that are coming from China.
That's a big risk.
We look at the drones that sometimes we spray our fields with that are produced in China, DJI. It's hard for a U.S. manufacturer to compete against them because of the subsidy that the Chinese government is giving to DJI and then of course our photos and our data is being uploaded into their own servers.
So there's many places where the Chinese can insert themselves and collect data and that's why I get Really cautious about when I see companies like Fufang and others that wanted to build, in our case, a lysine plant in Kingsbury, Indiana, next to a major rail line, a major intersection of where data is transported through optic fiber cable, too.
So there are just so many ways, and we can't take anything for granted.
As we finish up, if there's one specific thing that you think would be an urgent policy prescription now, what would that be?
I think we need to have a national agricultural strategy focused solely on agriculture and food to where we work with the private sector alongside government to really analyze what the risk is and then take the measured steps and action to go forward and make sure we're protected from any risk from the Chinese Communist Party We're infiltrating and taking away our own food security here in the United States.
As I said, food security is our national security.
And if we leave that open to continue to be compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, our own food security is at risk.
And as I said, all societies are only three meals from chaos.
And I don't want that to happen here.
Well, Kip Tom, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's an honor to be with you today.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Kip, Tom, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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