Designer Seed Thought to Be Latest Target by Chinese

choi

John Eligon and Patrick Zuo, Designer Seed Thought to Be Latest Target by Chinese. New York Times, Feb 5, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/us/ch ... ionage-efforts.html

two consecutive paragraphs:

“Foreign vegetable seeds make up 80 percent of Chinese market, said GUO Ming, a consultant specializing in corn breeds for a Beijing-based agribusiness firm. Multinational corporations’ share of the corn seed market in China grew from a tenth of a percent just over a decade ago to 11 percent in 2011, according to an article published last year in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper. Although China’s domestic corn output has been growing over the years, the yield per corn plant has not grown significantly.

“The Chinese have not developed a major corn hybrid since 2001, though the country’s second most popular corn, which debuted in 2007, was a collaboration between Pioneer and a Chinese company.

Note:
(a) “in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field [for seeds]. When confronted, the man, MO Hailong [总裁助理] 莫海龙, who was with his colleague WANG Lei 王磊
, appeared flushed. * * * FBI surveillance [showed]  all but one * * * worked for Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group 大北农集团 or its subsidiary Kings Nower Seed 北京金色农华种业科技有限公司 [another subsidiary is 绿色农华 whose website is not functional as of today] * * * [There was] a separate one [seed theft involving Chinese] in Kansas last year”

(b) “In the other seed case, ZHANG Weiqiang 张伟强, of Manhattan, Kan, a rice breeder for Ventria Bioscience, a [Fort Collins (65 miles north of Denver; home to Colorado State University),] Colorado-based biopharmaceutical company, and YAN Wengui 严文贵, of Stuttgart, Ark, a research scientist for the federal Agriculture Department, are accused of giving proprietary rice seeds that contained medicinal qualities to crop researchers [including those of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science 中国农业科学院 (based in Beijing)] in their native China.”
(i) Manhattan, Kansas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas
(at the junction of the Kansas River and Big Blue River; home of Kansas State University)
(ii) Stuttgart, Arkansas, is “45 miles (72 km) southeast of Little Rock.” Wikipedia

(c) The legend of a photo states, “Corn seedlings in a research greenhouse at Pioneer Hi-Bred, a subsidiary of DuPont, in Johnston, Iowa.”

Johnston, Iowa and Des Moines (capital of Iowa) are both located in Polk County, with Des Moines doubling as county seat.