China Controls Key Parts of America’s Food Supply Chain: Kip Tom

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Food security is our national security. Any nation that’s not food secure is only three meals from chaos. And I think Xi Jinping knows that very well,” says Kip Tom, a 7th generation farmer in Indiana and a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies for food and agriculture.

America is a lot less food secure than we may think, says Tom. Over half of all American agrochemical imports come from China. Chinese firms now own Syngenta, an agrochemical and seed giant, and Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, which was the world’s largest pork producer when it was acquired in 2013.

There are also concerns that the Chinese communist regime could launch cyberattacks on U.S. agricultural infrastructure and data systems—with major consequences for America’s food supply chain.

Tom argues that America needs a “national agricultural strategy” to safeguard American food security and protect agricultural innovation in the United States.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Kip Tom, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Kip Tom:
It’s an honor to be with you today.

Mr. Jekielek:
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.

Mr. Tom:
Oftentimes, we think that an 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 worked 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 food to the world.

Mr. Jekielek:
Before we jump into the U.S. side, obviously, the U.S. plays a huge role in those organizations and the FAO [The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations]. How deeply is China integrated into that?

Mr. Tom:
Today, the Chinese control mainly almost half or 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 Qu Dongyu 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 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. Just what would be an example of a country like that?

For instance, when Qu initiated the Hand in Hand initiative at the FAO, he wanted countries to come in and join FAO, bring their intellectual property, bring their financing, their educational expertise, knowledge, and go into different places. And it’s all for a good cause. If you could go to Africa and improve food security, that’s what we should be doing. We need to go into these developing nations and make sure that they’re food secure so we no longer have to provide humanitarian assistance in the form of food aid. The Chinese are very focused on trying to capture the largest amount of arable land, and that is on the continent of Africa.

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 landmass. They’re there for the ability to produce enough food to feed their own people, to be self-reliant. 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.

If I was to mention a specific country, I would probably go to Zimbabwe as an example. We visited there a number of times. You know there were facial recognition cameras all over the city when we arrived that were trying to track everybody’s movement. Ours in particular I’m sure. But when we see that and then we go out in the countryside you see the Chinese signs everywhere trying to control food retail, trying to control food processing. Maybe they’ve got a grant to go out and do some food processing and manufacturing with their equipment, with our U.S. dollars. They would bring in their people to do the work to capture the money and move it back into China. In the meantime the Africans remain unemployed and have little access to improve their economic contribution, let alone live a better lifestyle.

Mr. Jekielek:
We often hear about the Chinese regime basically buying different companies. A notable one was Smithfields, the largest pork producer in America. The question is, how did that ever happen?

Mr. Tom:
Well, I’m not sure what even happened today, whether it was Smithfield or whether it’s Syngenta. The reality is, let’s talk about Smithfield a little bit first. The reason why the Chinese Communist Party had such great interest in acquiring Smithfield was because they have a hog herd that’s nearly 10 times the size of that in the United States. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s 10 times bigger.

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 that they call condominiums. They are 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 were 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 and they produce seed genetics, and all the more reason why China would want to acquire them.

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, and more soybeans than we do. This gives them the ability to build up their own production on their own shores. Now, they still have restrictions on water, but the reality is if they can just produce 10 percent 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 GMO products and some of these chemistries, but the reality is now the Chinese own it. 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about Syngenta, because this is sort of more your, you’re of course, you know, kind of 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?

Mr. Tom:
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. 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 be 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 suspicious when I look at companies like Fufeng, who are wanting to build a plant 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. So very much against allowing too much manufacturing or any manufacturing, especially around military bases, but anywhere in the country, actually.

Mr. Jekielek:
Explain to me the national security dimension from your vantage point.

Mr. Tom:
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. We had a situation on our farm and other farms throughout the Midwest where we’re producing seeds, in our case for a buyer. We had Chinese nationals that were coming out at night digging up the pure parent lines of the seed that we were producing on our farm, only to be taken to O’Hare airport in Chicago, put in a warehouse, and then shipped back to China. They think that’s perfectly fine.

It’s not fine. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars going into research to 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 could look at it, 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 is 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
These are your personal experiences here you’re talking about, right? A couple of examples. That’s remarkable.

Mr. Tom:
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 did we not catch? 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. and collect the value that it’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.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things you’ve talked about in the past is sort of 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.

Mr. Tom:
Well, we know there’s genetics. there’s our crop care products that they have tried to copy. You know, 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 what he would pay from the U.S. manufacturer. How long can we keep going with wheels of innovation if we continue to push manufacturing offshore?

The other risk we have there is if nearly 70 percent 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 percent if we could not protect our crops. China has the ability to do that today.

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.

Mr. Jekielek:
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, right? 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.

Mr. Tom:
No, I don’t think most consumers around the U.S. understand the threat that we are under. I don’t care if it’s from animal proteins, beef, pork, poultry. I don’t care if it’s the crops we grow, anywhere from rice to cranberries to corn to soybeans, they’re all as a linkage back to China in certain components that’s used to produce those crops or those animals that are 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 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 bringing 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 where I walked the 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 advancements in agronomy, genetics, our crop care products, and knowledge, our ability to make sure that we’re 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 nine or 10 billion people. So we have to do it today.

Mr. Jekielek:
Tell me a little bit about your background. You started here, so tell me more.

Mr. Tom:
Yes, certainly. 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. We fought in the Revolutionary War. We fought in the Civil War. We fought in World War I and World War II. But during that time frame, we made our way from the East Coast by wagon with nine children on and made it to northern Indiana where it’s home today and has been since 1837. I’m the seventh generation farmer there. My children are in their eighth generation of course and I have two grandchildren who just graduated from Purdue University. They’ll be the ninth that they choose to come back to the farm with their agriculture degree.

So 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 the earth, the climate, our productivity gains. We’ve done a lot, but we don’t talk about it often.

Mr. Jekielek:
Tell me a bit about your farm. How does it work?

Mr. Tom:
When I was born, Mom and Dad were farming roughly 120 acres and they raised five children on that farm. It’d be impossible today to do that, but we’ve grown significantly over the years. It was more of a lifestyle at that point in time back then and just getting by and doing what you need to do. But we’ve taken a much more structured and business approach to the farm. We use a lot of intensive, sophisticated models in the way we practice our agronomic practices. Tractors drive themselves, you get somebody in there operating it, sitting there, but they do that.

But today, we produce corn, soybeans, and seed corn, but it’s a much different farm than what it was in 1955 when I was born. But it’s something I’m really proud of. We may not have had a lot as children, but the reality is it’s the values they gave us that was the most appreciated. We were in organizations like 4-H and we knew the community had to come first. We worked together. But the farm has changed a lot over time and will continue to grow. And you got to have these economies of scale to be able to invest. Investing in the computer technologies we use on our farms to increase productivity and protect the environment.

Mr. Jekielek:
Now tell me a little bit about this, the corn seed that you sell, right? And why the Chinese nationals that you described might be so interested in that. What is it about this corn seed that makes it so valuable to them, in your mind?

Mr. Tom:
Obviously, what’s so valuable to them is the increased productivity, the yields you can get from it. 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 to 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. They’re very permeable and they’ve been able to come in and dig up these seeds and start from scratch and produce it themselves.

Mr. Jekielek:
It took you 12 years to breed this specific line. This is your intellectual property that is being stolen.

Mr. Tom:
Yes, it is. It could 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 and 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. So 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. Genetics also plays over into the livestock or the protein sector, whether it’s pork, cattle, or chickens, the way we can advance them to be more efficient. We want to use less fuel and less chemicals.

Mr. Jekielek:
We want to increase productivity and make sure that we’re doing what’s right for the environment. How much of a hold over U.S. agriculture does the Chinese regime have right now? Can you give me some kind of measure?

Mr. Tom:
Nearly 70 percent of our crop care products, pesticides or chemicals 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 DJI drones that sometimes we spray our fields with that are produced in China. 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. That’s why I get really cautious when I see companies like Fufeng and others that want 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. There are just so many ways, and we can’t take anything for granted.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to briefly talk about the reality of the drones. That’s a great example. Explain to me why DJI can undercut the U.S. product companies,
which exist and are absolutely trying to make it.

Mr. Tom:
You have commercial drones, and then you have those for personal use. We may not think that information is critical or valuable to somebody, but, you know, they have ways of taking this data, whether it’s coming from either platform, the personal or the commercial, and in time, learning from it, learning whether how to improve not only the product, but improve their knowledge of what’s where in the United States, or they can track how we’re achieving some of the productivity gains because they’re able to take these NDVI maps or green biomass maps. They can do things with those that we’re unaware that it is benefiting them and not us, certainly. But the Chinese government will underwrite these and continue to move in. It’s hard for a U.S. manufacturer to compete against them at this point in time.

Mr. Jekielek:
They see the national security dimension of subsidizing such a company. I think that that may not be obvious to everyone. There’s a bigger play often when it comes to these things.

Mr. Tom:
Yes, you can see four or five people in a community, they’re flying them over their residential areas that they live in and may seem very harmless, right? But the reality is that’s still information that’s going into their servers and their ability to understand what’s going on in rural America, what’s going on in urban America where they’re flying drones. There’s a lot of information to be captured there. We may see it as something that doesn’t seem like it’s important to us, but I guarantee you they’ll find out, figure out some way that’s important to them.

Mr. Jekielek:
How many U.S. drones are flying over Chinese rural land?

Mr. Tom:
I doubt there’s any American drones flying over China. I’m sure they probably wouldn’t allow them to be imported. So that’s a critical issue.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is an issue of our lack of reciprocity.

Mr. Tom:
I look at imagery a lot of times, satellite imagery. And we know that there’ve been multiple cases where there’ve actually been Chinese satellites coming up next to U.S. satellites and trying to pull the information off of it. I know from experience that I used to see satellite imagery across places in China where we would see entire villages that existed two days earlier of Uyghurs in this case that had all suddenly disappeared. No cell phone pings, nothing. We collect a lot of data too, as we should, but we’re doing it for humanitarian reasons to make sure that the right things are occurring when they should have.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that you’ve talked about when you testified in Congress is the possibility of cyberattack. Again, you don’t think of cyberattacks necessarily as impacting agriculture as much as you might think of, for example, power grids or something like that. But tell me a little bit more about that.

Mr. Tom:
The pandemic taught us a couple of things. I mainly look at our food processing in the protein sector. If we get into a poultry processing plant or pork processing plant or beef there’s a lot of autonomy and a lot of robotics now. I think of what they could do in hacking into that system and creating havoc with it. At JBS United there was a cyberattack. It’s probably been four or five years ago now, where they were impacted and they paid the ransom. But the cost had to be in the hundreds of millions of loss for the beef or pork that did not go out into the supply chain.

I look at cyberattacks and how they could affect production in agriculture. It’s what it could do to our data systems where we’re collecting information and putting it up into a server in the cloud. It could be in our equipment how it’s going out across the field, our irrigation systems, our management
of that, and all of a sudden the electric grid went down. So there’s a number of places where they could play a big role. If I’m in the West and I’m concerned about water resources, that’s an obvious place where I would put a lot of focus on what could occur there.

Mr. Jekielek:
Explain that to me a little more.

Mr. Tom:
Let’s go to eastern Washington as an example, where a very water-limited area anyway, they could hack into that system and shut the wells, the pumps down, the distribution down, and people, communities, crops, and everybody’s without water for a period of time. So that can happen anywhere, just like it can happen to the electrical grid. I worry about the Chinese, but I worry about the Russians just as much.

Mr. Jekielek:
How ready is the U.S. for these types of cyberattacks, whether it’s corporate or ag?

Mr. Tom:
We had a conference in Spokane, Washington last March to address that issue. I’ve met up a number of times with some of the members of the House Agriculture Committee after my testimony on China there. We’re ill-prepared, to be honest with you. I think very little has been done to protect us to the level we need to be.
Now, is this always up to the government? Probably not. Private sector needs to do some of this too. And I think I see more movement on the private sector side trying to take the steps to make sure that our food system is protected from some of these cyber attacks. But when it comes to the government, I’m not sure they’re making as much progress as I’d like to hope to see.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does an ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agencies do?

Mr. Tom:
A lot of people ask that question. So it’s based in Rome, Italy, because that’s where all these UN organizations are at. Not sure it needs to be in Rome. It seems like it could be in Addis Ababa or maybe Dubai or somewhere else, but they picked Rome. We oversaw the second largest budget in international organizations next to NATO, so it’s a serious job. It’s very technical in nature, but we would have oversight of the U.S. contributions to the different agencies there.

We had the World Food Program, which was intended to and does a very good job most often, but still not as efficient as we’d like to see, but delivering humanitarian aid around the world where people are in dire or they’re in hunger. We know that 70 percent of the places we deliver that food aid are amidst a man-made conflict. So you could ask yourself, did the hunger happen first or did the man-made conflict? Oftentimes it can go either way.

Then we had the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is supposed to create resiliency and capacity in farming systems, which I’ve seen very little of in my time and travels throughout Africa and the Middle East. That’s the other body. We had another organization called IDLO [International Development Law Organization], where we actually, before we left Rome, serving under President Trump, we actually turned their focus into Africa and trying to see what we could do with these attorneys we had there to unravel some of these debt spirals that are being created in Africa. A very effective organization. We had EFAD [International Finance for Agriculture Development], another place where China would always leverage up their ability to access that capital, and a lot of it was our capital, to go out and conduct their activities throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Then another organization was Unidraw. This was one that really benefited the U.S. very well. In fact, Secretary Pompeo signed an agreement where it was for mining, agriculture, and construction equipment. We could perfect loans and liens around the world. This benefited U.S. machinery manufacturers to get this equipment out and working in the world, a number of organizations that really focused on agriculture and food.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you have a sense of how big is that budget and what percentage of it is U.S. dollars out of curiosity?

Mr. Tom:
The U.S. mandatory to the World Food Program for instance is usually 40 percent. We’re somewhere around 24 percent at the FAO, maybe a little bit more. We’re probably a little bit higher percentage at EFAD. Unidraw is very small budget and IDLO, very small budget. But the reality is it’s not just what we give on the mandatory side, it’s what we give on the voluntary side.

If there’s a special need, as an example would have been like we got late notice that the African desert locusts. It came out of Pakistan, went across the Arabian Peninsula, and it came into the Sahel of Africa through Somalia and into Ethiopia and on into Sudan. These locusts would actually just consume the entire food supply that was in all those areas where they traveled. We saw them when they flew over the sky and would just turn black.

That was nearly a 350 million dollar campaign to attempt to stop this insect, which was going to create maybe a four or five billion dollar humanitarian aid package that would go in there. So there’s some places, times we get, we can be effective, but we need to be involved and make sure we manage and oversight is really critically important, and I say this often. Whether it’s working with USAID and their contributions into these different programs ,we need to measure success by the outcomes and not by how much money we spend, and I don’t think we do enough of that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Wait, are you saying that success is measured by how much money is spent?

Mr. Tom:
A lot of it, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s incredible.

Mr. Tom:
Yes, and it’s billions and billions of dollars. Go back to the UN World Food Program. You’re asking how much money is contributed by the U.S. and others. Executive Director Beasley, who did a phenomenal job in running the organization, was a road warrior standing up for U.S. values. Even though he’s at the UN, he stood up for a lot of U.S. values. The contributions that year were nearly $14 billion.

Today, the world just doesn’t have that same capacity. I’ve heard this year the budget may be between $6 and $7 billion. So that means that they need to be more efficient. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine that they’re meeting the needs that they have in some of these countries around the world, which means there’s probably more people going hungry today than what there were before because the money isn’t there.

Mr. Jekielek:
What has the U.S. done thus far to try to challenge the Chinese regime’s encroachment into the food systems?

Mr. Jekielek:
I don’t see us doing much at all today, to be honest with you. I think the private sector has placed a significant effort and has an eye on what’s taking place and putting the measures in place to make sure they protect their supply chains, make sure they protect their intellectual property. They’re doing more than probably anybody. I’m not sure our government has done what it needs to do, because there are certain elements of this which the government should take some responsibility for. They can pass the policy, move it into law that would prevent some of this ownership, some of this purchasing of U.S. companies. And it’s very complex.

A lot of times, the Chinese can have ownership, and you wouldn’t know how they have ownership, but through a chain of transactions that’s taken place. So I don’t think we’re doing nearly enough in the United States to protect ourselves, whether it’s IP, whether it’s land ownership, whether it’s cybersecurity attacks, or bringing our critical supply chains back to the United States. We seem to be just, it’s working right now, leave it alone.

Mr. Jekielek:
Indiana passed a bill recently preventing China from owning or leasing farmland in the state. Tell me a little bit about that and is it something that makes sense?

Mr. Tom:
It makes absolute sense, but I don’t think we can just draw the line at China. I think we need to understand there’s obviously other adversaries around the world that would like to collect data or conduct their nefarious activities in the United States. So I’m very supportive of anyone that keeps China from investing further in the United States, because there will always be another motive for why they would invest here. We talked about the examples of Smithfield.

We talked about Syngenta, which actually was a Swiss corporation, still traded, still very active in the United States. We just need to understand, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Russia, we need to make sure that foreign ownership of land or companies is in the right hands. And I realize we have bodies here in Washington that have oversight
over this, but I’m not sure it’s at the level it needs to be.

Mr. Jekielek:
You may actually have some insight into Canada and the European Union. How are they approaching this?

Mr. Tom:
Canada is behaving more like Europe all the time, like the 27 nations with the inside of the EU. As a neighbor, I’m disturbed by that because we see the trend of them putting their short-term prosperity ahead of their long-term security. And that’s a phrase that I think all of us should embed in our mind as we conduct transactions with China, or we look at making a purchase of a particular product, or we look at our regulatory affairs in our country, China, I think, is playing a heavy hand throughout Canada. We know Canada’s got a lot of natural resources. That tends to be a place they go.

But I can point quickly to places like Brazil. You know, Brazil has become a powerhouse in agriculture through a lot of US innovations that have been put in place there. But we see China going in and doing infrastructure projects of dredging rivers, building rail lines, buying ports. I think the Belts to Road Initiative is something that we need to, as Americans, understand that this gives them the ability to be an economic superpower. The Belt and Road Initiative is alive and well in Latin America. It’s throughout Africa. It’s throughout Europe. They’re looking 50 years or 100 years down the road, and that’s something we don’t do often enough.

Mr. Jekielek:
What are the prescriptions for putting long-term security ahead of short-term gain?

Mr. Tom:
First of all, we’ve got to get engaged, and I don’t think we’re engaged enough. We have to have people that are passionate about this and make it their job one. You can’t imagine we’re here in the Western Hemisphere, and the role that China plays, whether it’s in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. With automobile manufacturing in Mexico, we need to at least make it in our own hemisphere and make sure that we’re secure here.

We haven’t done that. We’ve been allowing them to come in. China is there and involved and engaged in their activities in that nation, which puts us under threat in the Western Hemisphere. Canada goes along with that, of course. When you say the U.S. has to become engaged, what does that look like on the ground? Who is involved with foreign leaders throughout Latin America, Central America, and Canada, exposing just what the risk is and what it will do to their sovereignty. Until we get out there and continue to push this forward, it needs to span different administrations. This can’t be something that’s going to be fixed in one administration. We need to do this over time, and it’s throughout the Western hemisphere.

Mr. Jekielek:
We need to do this over time one specific thing that you think would be an urgent policy prescription now, what would that be?

Mr. Tom:
We need to have a national agricultural strategy focused solely on agriculture and food 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 infiltrating and taking away our own food security here in the United States. As I said, food security is our national security. If we leave that open to continually be compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, our own food security is at risk. As I said, all societies are only three meals from chaos, and I don’t want that to happen here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Kip Tom, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Tom:
It’s an honor to be with you today. Thank you.