Democratic capitals – from Washington to Tokyo – are concerned about their reliance on Chinese technologies and its implications for national security. And while much of the focus remains on telecommunications companies and social platforms like TikTok, and their potential misuse of personal data such as the threat that TikTok sharing these data with Chinese intelligence for disinformation and hybrid warfare, this narrow scope overlooks broader vulnerabilities that pose far more significant risks.
In response to growing levels of food insecurity driven by climate change and population growth, farmers worldwide are increasingly relying on new technologies that could help China gain a dominant position in the global food market. More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.
The high level of security vulnerabilities associated with smart agriculture technologies, combined with the current lack of preparedness to address them, makes these technologies a potential target for adversaries.
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Technological innovation is the centerpiece of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” which aims to transform China into a leading global powerhouse by 2049. In this context, it is crucial to shift the attention away from merely banning Chinese-developed technologies to examining their broader security implications and developing a more meaningful national security policy and rhetoric to address their vulnerabilities. A recent report by the US House of Representatives highlighted the threats posed by Chinese drone technologies in academic research programs, not just for siphoning off raw data, but also as a backdoor to access university IT systems and knowledge repositories.
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China is the world leader in the agricultural drone industry, having experienced a drone revolution in agriculture since the late 2010s. Chinese-owned drone manufacturers XAG and DJI are leaders in the smart agriculture industry. These farming-specific drones can spray, feed, and monitor crops with more precision and speed than any human. They are fast-growing and one of the most widely used industry-level drones. [...]
As part of their investment strategy, the Chinese government has made military agreements with Chinese-owned agriculture drone manufacturers and agriculture research universities. Their military-civil fusion strategy – integrating civilian technologies with military goals – enables the Chinese government to exploit critical farming data for economic and military advantages. To support sustainable food production by monitoring crop health and predicting crop yields, the drones collect alarmingly specific data about the crops and regions they are used in. For example, a drone used for corn fields in the US, one of the world’s largest corn exporters, will gather detailed information about the area’s climate, soil conditions, and susceptibility to pests and diseases. The onboard AI can analyze this data to report crop vulnerabilities and identify optimum growth conditions for these and other crops, such as rice and wheat – foods on which much of the world’s population depends. From Brazil’s soy farms to Spain’s olive groves, the Chinese government could potentially access farming data from customers in any region.
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Conclusion
While concerns about critical infrastructure espionage tied to Chinese drones are growing, their potential to dominate the food market – and to conduct biological warfare against crops –remains largely overlooked. As the Chinese agricultural technology juggernaut quietly grows, policymakers must act now to safeguard national security. Nations can protect their food security and economic interests by regulating the data collected by agricultural drones, preventing third-party access, and reassessing the broader strategic implications of these technologies. Yet, for now, the data gathered by these drones is far less regulated than the data collected by TikTok. Failure to act could give China a decisive advantage in any prospective future confrontation. Left unchecked, the exploitation of smart agriculture data could leave nations vulnerable to food-based coercion. If this becomes part of China’s asymmetric warfare strategy, they are clearly playing the long game for global dominance.
A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.
It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.
Okay, fine. I'll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.
But...how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can't obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?
That seems like an awful stretch.
Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.
Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let's say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?
As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.
It exports a lot of staple food. It's the source, not the consumer.
It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency -- I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe's food needs purely from the increased output without bringing any more land into production.
It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets -- as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world. This assessment is that in a defensive naval and air war, which is what such a blockade would involve, it could alone prevail against the combined militaries of the entire rest of the world. And on top of that, a substantial portion of the other major naval powers are allied to the US. China is very unlikely to be in a position where it could blockade the US, and if we imagine the kind of changes necessary to create some scenario where it was, I'd suggest that this scenario would also very probably bring with it other issues that would be of greater concern to the US than food security.
I'm willing to believe that it might be possible to target "university IT systems" for commercially-useful data, but it's not clear to me that that's something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I'd be more worried about the firmware on one's Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.
Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It's talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I'm going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That's a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we've got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.
5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can mitigate some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and block every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you're looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country -- look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it's also unable to do much.
To quote Sun Tzu:
You have a finite amount of resources. You can use them to mitigate some threats. You cannot effectively counter all potential threats. You have to prioritize. If we want to counter agricultural drones as an attack vector, then we accept greater vulnerability elsewhere to do so. The question is not simply "does a potential vulnerability exist", but "is this the optimal place to expend resources"?