Doug LaMalfa Sounds Alarm On Harmful Fungal Pathogen To Crops ‘Smuggled In’ By Chinese Nationals

Forbes Breaking News

During House floor remarks on Thursday, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) spoke about a fungal pathogen recently brought to the U.S. from Chinese nationals.

Transcript

00:00Mr. Speaker, recently two Chinese nationals were arrested in Michigan for

00:07having smuggled in some pathogen that would be greatly harmful to our

00:14agricultural crops and related the livestock or even the human use for

00:19these crops. A fungal pathogen known as Fusarium graminarium was identified in

00:28scientific literature as being a potential agro-terrorism weapon. This is

00:33what the two Chinese nationals called Yongqing Jian and Zhinyang Liu brought

00:39into the country. They smuggled these this pathogen in via their electronic

00:45devices which contained also evidence of Chinese Communist Party membership and

00:52the different methods with which they brought the the pathogen in

00:58were hidden in whether it was their devices or in tissues in various ways of

01:05smuggling it past customs. Now we can't imagine what kind of a threat this would

01:12be towards our agricultural production in this country if something like this was

01:17allowed to get loose. They tried to get it into the University of Michigan through

01:21their test labs there through the work the university does in agriculture and

01:26somehow maybe do what infect everything that was going through Michigan and

01:31coming out in the new crops. Some of the effects on it are in certain grains it

01:38would be devastating for example in wheat and barley maize rice indeed one for the

01:43world's most important staple crops. It would infect these crops during their

01:48flowering stage which then reduces the grain yield and the grain quality. The grains

01:53often would appear shriveled bleached or pinkish making them unusable. Also with

02:00these my talk mitotoxins in here it you would have an issue which would cause

02:05toxicity in humans and animals which would be causing them to vomiting or even

02:12worse effects in the livestock or people that would happen to use it. So what would

02:17the possible impact be? Could be billions of dollars in crop losses globally each year

02:21due to lost yield, contamination, and rejection in the market. These mycotoxins

02:27would cause vomiting as I mentioned, liver damage, immune suppression, and

02:32reproductive defects in both humans and livestock. This is pretty nasty stuff that

02:37Chinese Communist Party is sneaking in by one means or the other into this country

02:42in this case here at University of Michigan. It's known to be funded by the

02:46Chinese government though the University of Michigan states it has received no

02:50funding directly from the Chinese government funding this work but it

02:54points out that we need more clarification, more more clear knowledge of the

03:02status of who is funding research, who is funding colleges, who is funding

03:06universities with things like this because this is a bigger threat than we

03:10can imagine to the American food supply both domestically and those who would

03:16support around the world with what we produce. So one of the two nationals has

03:20been accused of multiple smuggling attempts from 2022 through 2024. Again

03:25mentioned hiding samples in the boots or mailed in a textbook, whatever they might be

03:30carrying aboard. So what are we going to do about this? Are we going to tighten up the

03:37restrictions on what is coming in through China and have closer checks of who is

03:42being allowed to import things and what is happening at our universities or we just

03:47let this go and have our food supply devastated by the constant threat of

03:52people trying to undermine and break down our country? We can't have these

03:57contaminated harvests. We can't have the continued threat to the confidence people

04:04in this country and our exporters have in the American food supply. You can't you

04:11can't overstate what this means for agriculture, what it means for the US

04:16economy, what it means for our national security of the food supply we grow and

04:22the health overall of US citizens. So with that we need to do a much better job

04:30whether it's going to be what's smuggled through our airports or who's being

04:35allowed to bring things into this country and what their research consists

04:38of and who's funding it mainly in this case the Chinese Communist Party and their

04:43government. It's a dead serious issue we better take it serious we're going to be

04:47in big trouble. I yield back.

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