Sen. Tom Cotton is proposing the establishment of an intelligence office inside the Agriculture Department to prevent China from stealing proprietary food technology developed by American corporations.
Cotton introduced the Agriculture Intelligence Measures Act Wednesday with co-author Rep. Rick Crawford, a fellow Arkansas Republican. The bill would allow the Agriculture Department to use existing U.S. intelligence assets to investigate plots to steal information on scientifically patented crops.
The legislation also aims to provide the federal officials with greater capability to prevent attempts to sabotage American farming, such as the recent discovery of suspicious packages of seeds that appear to have been mailed from China to the United States.
“The Chinese Communist Party wants to undermine vital American industries through sabotage and intellectual property theft. U.S. agriculture is no exception. Our bill will help safeguard the food and technology that our country depends on for its prosperity and freedom,” Cotton said in a statement.
In introducing their bill, Cotton and Crawford listed four incidents involving Chinese efforts to steal or sabotage U.S. agricultural products, including the 2019 indictment of a Chinese national on charges of economic espionage while working at Monsanto, a U.S. agriculture technology firm.
