Chinese ownership of U.S. land has been an ongoing issue for the country and is becoming a threat as Republican lawmakers ramp up their fight against perceived threats from the Communist Party.
Farmers in Iowa reportedly accuse China of stealing valuable seed samples from the U.S. that have been genetically modified to improve crops and reproduce them back home.
The farmers stressed their worries to a bipartisan delegation of congressional lawmakers during a Thursday roundtable meeting titled "The impacts of the [Chinese Communist Party's] malign tactics to undermine American agriculture" in Dysart, Iowa.
According to Newsweek, farmers pay a fee in order to use genetically modified seeds. When Chinese nationals steal those seeds, allowing Chinese firms to skip research and development, they steal American intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets for their advantage.
"In my opinion, it's part of a much larger, country-wide, slow-motion heist of American intellectual property," Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) said during the roundtable. "We have a duty to protect all our technology, whether in Silicon Valley or a cornfield here in Iowa."
The Congressional roundtable cited a 2012 case where a Dysart, Iowa, farmer caught a man wearing business attire digging up hybrid seeds, which were sent back to China. The man was later arrested by the FBI for stealing U.S. agriculture trade secrets and sent back to China in 2016 for long-term conspiracy efforts.
The FBI estimates that Chinese theft of American IP costs the U.S. economy as much as $600 billion yearly. In 2020, woke FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged the growing issue, saying there has been a massive 1,300 percent spike in IP theft and corporate espionage cases linked to China.
"Both the Trump and Biden Administrations have oriented U.S. strategy around competing with the Chinese Communist Party—but we are not competing if we're letting the CCP steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans," Gallagher continued. "We're throwing the game from the outset. So just like the farmer in the Iowa field, you're being robbed every day in plain sight by the Chinese Communist Party."
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill) stressed that agriculture innovation is vital to the U.S. economy, and having the Chinese Communist Party swoop in and steal developing secrets from hard-working researchers is unacceptable.
Another farmer told the lawmakers, "When they steal that, and they use all that technology for nothing, they are stealing from every Iowa farmer and every farmer in America that's using that type of technology."