We Must Protect One of Our Greatest National Assets from China

Originally published by the National Review

Farm security is national security. Our foreign adversaries, primarily the People’s Republic of China (PRC), own large swaths of agricultural land across our country. Every acre of this land could potentially be used as a platform for surveillance or sabotage. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a regime that has openly promised to overtake us as the world’s superpower by all means at its disposal, has already used agricultural espionage to further its malign goals.

A “fungus arrest” in June 2025 may have prevented a food supply disaster, with two Chinese-national researchers at the University of Michigan allegedly smuggling samples of a toxic fungus considered a potential agroterrorism weapon into the U.S. The pathogen is responsible for head blight, a disease devastating to wheat, rice, and barley that could have destroyed nearly 150 million acres of crops. In 2022 a Chinese citizen pleaded guilty to economic espionage for stealing intellectual property relating to data analytics for maximizing farm yields, in what the Department of Justice called a “danger to the U.S. economy” that jeopardized “our nation’s leadership in innovation and our national security.” A few years earlier, another Chinese national was imprisoned and ordered to forfeit farms he had purchased in Iowa and Illinois for his role in a long-term conspiracy to steal ag trade secrets, including valuable proprietary corn seeds to be transported back to China. While law enforcement has performed admirably in these and other individual cases, until recently, our federal government has lacked the tools needed to protect us from this persistent and systematic threat.

There are three primary ways in which the Chinese Communist Party has used gaps in regulations and enforcement to undermine our farm security.

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