Cancelling Farm Animals
August 6, 2021Farm Banking
August 20, 2021GUEST: Chris Bennet, Editor, Farm Journal Author, While America Slept, China Stole the Farm
With 1.4 billion hungry people to be fed, the opening of China that began in 1972 was to have been a monumental win for American agriculture. And in fact, China is still the world’s top importer of food, which makes some American farmers very happy.
But if American agriculture is happy selling food to China, China is not happy in being dependent on America’s food. Evidence suggests that China is doing everything in its power to end its dependency on imported food, and that includes taking America’s technology.
In 2011, the U.S. Director for the Beijing Da Bei Nong Technology Group, Mo Hei Long, was twice caught crawling through the corn rows of the Midwest with pockets full of Monsanto and Pioneer seed corn. These creepy crawls through the corn rows awakened the curiosity of the FBI, which discovered that Hei Long had been sending seeds to relatives in China for at least five years.
China’s theft of America’s ag technology now takes place on an industrial scale, with no secret being left un-stolen. And yet many of those secrets were not stolen, but simply given away.
A Washington apple farmer told me the story of how a group of China’s ag officials were given a tour of the state’s apple farms and processing facilities, and how a few years later China dominated the world’s market for apple juice. The same was true for other high-value specialty crops, like garlic.
The transformation of Chinese agriculture over the past few decades leads us to ask:
Leave Comment Below: Did China steal our farm, or did we give China our farm?
Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain
#1 Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.
#2 The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food.
#3 Cheap food isn’t! READ MORE