China and US agriculture – robbing us blind?

 

In a comment to yesterday’s post, “The global food crisis – some people still don’t get it“, reader “John in Indy” said:

I recently read of a near Western state giving a ChiCom related company money and tax breaks to build a corn to amino acid processing plant that will consume 17 Billion bushels of corn per year, and export the end products. WTF !!!

I’m aware of the incident of which he writes.  It’s the Fufeng Group and its activities in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  There’s an excellent in-depth study of the situation there in these two articles:


In a nutshell:

The new [amino acid] plant is estimated to consume 25,000,000 bushels of corn for less than one hundred jobs – 250,000 bushels (or 14,000,000 pounds) of American corn per year, per job. Moreover, the Grand Forks City Council and CCP-favorite Governor Burgum are promising to build and subsidize a $150 million natural gas pipeline, and will spend an additional tens of millions of dollars to subsidize construction of Fufeng’s new plant. Fufeng Group will also be offered a “temporary” tax break for years (or decades) to come. Rather than boosting the local economy, the plant will be leeching from it.

One might wonder if Fufeng Group’s founder and chairman, Li Xuechun, shared with the North Dakota luminaries his intention to convert most of the plant’s production to export sales no later than 2025, only a few months after anticipated conclusion of the plant’s buildout? American-made amino acids being sent at the lowest profitable cost possible to feed the swine, beef, and poultry industries of Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, all of whom are much friendlier to China with regard to finished meat exports than the United States is. It’s a canny strategic maneuver, and as is unfortunately typical of our political leadership, the short-term promise of profits, fundraising, and (perhaps) future jobs is a leash with which Chinese companies manipulate their American running dogs.

The bad news continues. Chinese Communist Party personnel overlap with management in Fufeng Group. Founder and Chairman of the Board, Li Xuechun, served as deputy to the Shandong Province 12th People’s Congress starting in 2003 (see page 80) while also being named as the “Model Labour” of the province in the same year. Fufeng itself further exists as a vector of CCP policy. In remarks delivered to the 16th People’s Congress of Qiqihar on 26 December 2017, Mayor Li Yugang emphasized the Party’s role in building and operationalizing Fufeng’s wet corn mill in less than a year, while reinforcing the Party’s commitment to “accelerate” Fufeng’s plans to expand production capacity of amino acids at the plant to consumer more than 3 million metric tons per year of corn. In his annual report issued on 7 January 2020, Mayor Li reiterated that Fufeng is a “national key leading enterprise” in ensuring food security for China.

There’s more in both articles linked above.  In a time of worldwide food shortages, it’s also worth noting that 25,000,000 bushels of corn could feed an awful lot of people (if the correct varieties were grown).  Americans may not consider corn a primary grain for human consumption, but it is in large parts of Africa.  It’s at the same level as rice in Asia.

An even more illuminating article studied China’s agricultural industrial espionage in America.

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

China has breached the inner walls of the U.S. agriculture industry in what has arguably been the most expansive heist in farming history, and is currently attempting to steal or hack every conceivable facet of U.S. agriculture technology.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly has declared its intent to dominate high-tech industries across the world, including agriculture, by 2025. Undergirding its technological superiority effort, China has unabashed plans for a solo climb to the top rung of the global power ladder by 2049—international dominion. In order to fuel its ascendance, the CCP is engaged in widespread theft, cyber-hacking, and espionage, with the U.S. as the honey hole of illicit gain.

. . .

Over the past decade, China has appropriated trillions of dollars in sophisticated U.S. technology, with a keen interest in the latest advances in the agriculture industry. In 2013 and 2015, Chinese nationals were nabbed in flagrante delicto by federal authorities, attempting to transport pilfered corn and rice seed to China. However, as the arrests and prosecutions made national headlines, the hard evidence remained ignored. Based on a cursory examination of the CCP’s espionage footprint, the seed thefts are merely emblematic and represent the tip of the iceberg: Beijing is looting the American farm.

There’s much more at the link, including details of the incidents mentioned above.  It’s likely that China has already obtained samples of all the highly engineered and genetically modified seeds used in US agriculture, and is probably adapting them for its own use.

All three articles are well worth reading.  They’re prime examples of how our greatest commercial, industrial and military rival is robbing us blind – and the US government seems to be helpless to stop them.  Considering the amount that the Biden family is alleged to have earned from corrupt business dealings with China, that may not be surprising.

Peter

9 comments

  1. Sigh, Peter this is very well related to the last article about tactics Vs Logistics.

    China is spending their pile of Treasury T-Bills (Because they don't need them for oil anymore) before they become worthless to BUY Real Things. Things like Oil, Coal, FOOD and Food Production.

    At the risk of being a broken record Famine Wars or a Michael Yon says PanFamWar.

    China plays the Long Game while our easily bought politicians (both President-CONgress as well as locals) think only of next election and their wallets.

    Got food? Going to get real in a few weeks, maybe a few months according to my friends in the food warehousing business and my chats with local grocery stores and Walmart. They are NOT Getting what they order and just wait to SEE what comes in the trucks.

  2. Move along, nothing to see or hear here. Meet the new boss same as the old boss and the next boss in November.

  3. It's rather pointless to go on about the Chinese. They're just doing what any rising / resurgent (more in their case) civilization does: get what they can while they can from decadent, poxed-to-the-gills raddled, whores of dying civilizations.

    Americans, post 1945, have been 'Carefully Taught' (The song, 'You Have to be Carefully Taught' from South Pacific deliberately puts the arrow of causality backwards because the aim was to bamboozle the Cattle into going against evolved group preferences) to direct their frustrations outward and not focus on the cancers and chancres in their body politic.

    Focus your hate inwards. It's the only way to clean and salvage something. Anything.

  4. The United States sanctions its trading partners if they ban Drag Queen Story Hour.

    China just wants to trade. They don't tell the Brazilians or the Tongans how to live their lives and bully them into adopting sodomy and child mutilation. Sure they'll steal your IP, too. And bribe your politicians… and blackmail them… and stretch the letter of your law to breaking point in any kind of legal dealings.

    Sounds rather like your Greatest Ally ™ — who BTW happily sold US Tech to China to help kickstart their modern jet fighter development (J10) — except that bit more yellow and not blanket authorized to pillage anyone's lands in a dubious nasty old book of violent bloodthirsty tales.

    Chinese gonna Chinese… When are Americans gonna American?… Not the way their puppeteers direct them… but they way they once did? Clean house the way you did with the Apaches and Comanches.

  5. The ND Trade Delegation is very fond of selling things to places like China, Cuba and Russia, always has been.

  6. In regards to this:

    "I recently read of a near Western state giving a ChiCom related company money and tax breaks to build a corn to amino acid processing plant that will consume 17 Billion bushels of corn per year, and export the end products. WTF !!!"

    You might want to fact check this against how many billions of bushels of corn the U.S. produces each year! In other words what the comment says is wildly inaccurate!

    1. I will not say Mea Culpa for misremembering Billions for Millions of bushels of corn, where the outrage is that it happened at all.

  7. Speaking as a farmer….. if you want me to grow the”right” varieties, then you need to offer me enough money for my product to make it worthwhile.
    If you don’t like that idea, then buy the bloody land and grow it yourself.

    Telling farmers what they must grow and how much they will get paid for it, is what Communists do….. and they have starved tens of millions of people to death when those making the decisions proved to be less competent judges of need than farmers meeting the free market.

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