Zinke on Arrest of Chinese for Biological Pathogen: We Have to Ban Adversaries from Farmland, Access to Food Supply Chain

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line,” Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) reacted to the arrest of two Chinese nationals for allegedly attempting to smuggle a biological pathogen into the U.S. by saying that the food supply chain would be a good place to inject disease and this is why China and other adversaries need to be banned from owning farmland and having access to the food supply chain.

Zinke said, “I think we should be very, very concerned…I don’t believe it’s by coincidence. One is the military sites, but also agriculture as part of our supply chain, if you’re going to inject funguses, disease into our water supply, where would you do it? You’d probably do it in our supply chain in our food chain. And remember, food security is national security. So, I don’t think it’s by coincidence, I think we should be concerned, and I think we should prohibit the Chinese and our adversaries from owning farmland and having access to our supply chain in our food supply.”

He added that we could handle land owned by Chinese-linked entities because “We can quarantine that, we could make sure that they don’t have access to the supply chain, we could put excessive monitoring on them, ensure that they don’t have any more land, or we could possibly just simply take it. It’s not unheard of in cases of national emergency, which, remember, China has not been our friend, remember where COVID came from. And so, I think it is a threat, it’s a no-brainer is around our military bases, but in our food supply, while it’s difficult to pay attention to, I think we are now, because, again, the funguses…we have bacteria, a number of biological, chemical parts and threats going into our supply system, particularly in our food, it’s a problem.”

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