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The US Has The World's Best Corn — And China Wants It
TED GENOWAYS · NEW REPUBLIC · 25 MINUTES
China's population is exploding, but its corn production is stagnating, forcing the Chinese to rely on US corn imports to feed its citizens. Geopolitically, this is less than ideal for the Chinese,1 and according to Ted Genoways' thrilling piece, Chinese companies are going to great lengths to steal the solution: Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer's high-yield — and highly-protected — genetically engineered corn hybrids.
1. The protected hybrids could end China's dependence on imported corn:
"The only tenable way for China to meet its own demand, then, is by planting high-performance hybrids, which can single-handedly double or potentially even triple per-acre corn production. Chinese scientists haven’t developed a significant corn hybrid in years. But Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, the two American seed giants, have produced so many successful hybrids that they now control 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world."
2. A listening device caught two Chinese agents describing themselves as 'spies':
"So, as they drive around rural Illinois looking for DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto test fields from which to steal, they begin making a list of the crimes they have committed. After some back and forth, they come up with trespassing for every time they have slipped onto private property, larceny for the seeds and ears they have been stealing from the fields, and multiple violations of intellectual property protections. 'These are actually very serious offenses,' Lin says. 'They could treat us as spies!' Ye interjects. Lin, exasperated, responds: 'That is what we’ve been doing!'"
3. And indeed, the US has used provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in its investigation:
"The federal government, thereby, has implicitly acknowledged that it considers agricultural products both an asset and a weapon in a long-range geopolitical chess match with China, a resource of near-military value and importance, one that must be protected by all available means. By that logic, those Chinese nationals stealing corn are spies, no different — and, indeed, perhaps more important — than those who swipe plans for a new weapons system."
Read: New Republic
