Emboldened by its ownership of Syngenta, the global agribusiness giant, China seems to be crossing the rubicon when it comes to high-tech agriculture.
Illustration by Tim Marrs
In 2018, a cluster of buildings resembling a Silicon Valley corporate campus popped up in the middle of Chongzhou County, a farming region in southwest China. Owned and operated by Syngenta Group, one of the world’s largest agribusiness conglomerates, the buildings house something called a Modern Agriculture Platform (MAP), and inside, Syngenta employees encourage local farmers to accelerate “modernization and rural revitalization in China.”
In various MAP hubs across the country
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Agriculture has traditionally been a fruitful area for China-U.S. cooperation, dating back to the two countries’ resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1970s. Now it is just another area marked by Sino-American distrust, as Washington hunts Chinese agriscience “spies” and Beijing races to reduce reliance on U.S. farm exports.
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