While American farmers and ranchers struggle just to stay afloat, China is cornering technology that will supercharge their state-owned agricultural industry — creating an insurmountable lead in their competition with us. A new study underlines the urgency of the threat, concluding that out of five critical technology sectors, “China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology.”
That finding, from the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, adds to a rising chorus of expert voices sounding the alarm that the U.S. is in imminent danger of falling permanently behind our chief geopolitical rival in the race to dominate this strategic sector.
Our farmers and ranchers would pay the steepest price, losing out on biotech-enabled breakthroughs that will boost their crop yields, protect against pests and diseases, and reduce inefficiencies in breeding, planting, harvesting, and processing. But the entire country would suffer the damage. Food security is national security, and beyond diminishing our ability to feed ourselves, surrendering our edge in biotechnology to China would weaken us on the trade and innovation fronts, as well.
Fortunately, our fate remains in our hands. With smart policy choices, leaders in Washington can ensure our farmers are equipped to compete and win in this global contest.
The solution should begin on Capitol Hill. The major budget bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill that represents President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority — includes some benefits for farmers and ranchers. But it lacks key provisions to help agricultural producers better use technology like gene editing to ensure we can continue to grow food, fiber, and renewable fuel for the homeland in novel and more sustainable ways. Advancing those initiatives requires passing a new farm bill.
Federal funding for food and agricultural research has been essentially flat for more than two decades, while China and other adversaries made major commitments to their own agricultural biotechnology sectors that closed the gap between their capabilities and ours.
“The Chinese government has made tremendous investments in its domestic biotechnology industry, plowing money into developing talent and building research infrastructure, unlike the United States, which has no strategic vision or coordination for federal biotechnology funding,” the bipartisan National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology recently found. The U.S. needs to keep pace to seed the next generation of American productivity breakthroughs in plants, animals, and microbes.
The farm bill would also guarantee farmers a level playing field with our trading partners. It would grant officials from the Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service a seat at the table with international bodies enforcing the highest scientific standards in biotech product approvals. Fully funding that office will also support advocacy for American farmers in international trade disputes, such as the U.S. confrontation last year with Mexico over biotech corn.
Back at home, the farm bill provides much-needed assistance to producers of everything from eggs to biofuels. The measure supports efforts such as the National Animal Health Laboratory Network and the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program that are bulwarks against foreign animal diseases, such as the bird flu that devastated poultry populations earlier this year and caused egg prices to spike.
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And for farmers focused on growing biofuels, the package extends a number of programs that have proven essential to bringing new and novel biobased products to the market. The sector has been a boon to American growers while also strengthening national security by reducing our dependence on foreign energy.
Finally, the farm bill will rationalize the regulatory bureaucracy that is needlessly hobbling American biotech innovation. This reform is long overdue. Under our current system, the relationships between the agencies responsible for coordinating industry oversight – USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration – are inefficient. As a result, biotech entrepreneurs face an expensive, years-long slog to secure product approvals and navigate the overlapping authority of these three separate agencies.
“This is not about our ability to run fast,” as the national security commission report recently put it, “it is about us tripping over our own shoelaces. While the United States innovates better than any other country in the world, we also make it unnecessarily difficult to commercialize and scale our best ideas.”
By passing a farm bill, Congress can help untie biotech breakthroughs that will empower our farmers and ranchers and fortify our national security.
John Torres is a longtime biotech government affairs executive and policy expert.