We Need Oil. They Need Pig.

China has battleships, missiles and awfully effective computer hackers. Soon it will have tasty American-made pork parts in its arsenal to threaten the United States.

To the Chinese government, pork is a strategic concern. It even has a strategic pork reserve, like the United States has a strategic oil reserve.

Some senators are objecting to a large Chinese food producer, Shuanghui International, buying Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the United States, in a $4.7 billion deal. Smithfield owns 460 farms and has contracts with 2,100 others that raise about 15.8 million hogs a year just in the United States. The lawmakers want the Obama administration to block the sale of the pork company for the same reason it recently blocked the sale of a wind-power company to a Chinese company — as a threat to this nation.

The fear is that China would somehow control the pork we eat or, perhaps worse, get our critical pork production technology and our secrets of manure management. If China got mad at the United States, instead of hacking our computers they’d choke off our pork-chop supply. (That the Chinese company is willing to pay handsomely — a 31 percent premium — for our pork technology, not steal it, should be noted by the senators as a step in the right direction.)

The Chinese worry a lot about food security. Americans don’t. But Ben Becker, the press secretary for the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in an interview that this is a luxury of a wealthy country. He warned that China might not stop at buying pork companies. “What if tomorrow it is the biggest dairy producer? Or the biggest corn producer?”

Say the Chinese, in a fit of pique, decided they would not sell this country another ham hock or breakfast link. Suppose Smithfield scooped up every one of its pigs by order of its Chinese masters and shipped them to China.

Why would we care? First, we Americans have been eating a lot less pork lately. We might not notice. But second, it’s not as if China can order the world’s pigs to stop reproducing. In a few months, we’d have a whole new passel of shoats ready to braise, roast and slather in barbecue sauce. Agricultural economists say it would take a few years for the rest of the American pork-packing plants to expand and replace the lost capacity.

Surely we could get by eating chicken, fish and, yes, more vegetables, until then. And that would be only if no one else in the world would sell us a pig part. (Mexican pork is quite tasty. I’d buy that in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.)

According to The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, the United States is the most “food secure” country in the world in terms of productive capacity, technology and other factors. China is 42nd. We spend only 13.9 percent of our household income on food. That’s the lowest in the world. The Chinese spend slightly more than the average of 38.3 percent.

The senators expressed worries at the Agriculture Committee hearing that the Chinese would use Smithfield’s technology and expertise to improve their production and then take foreign markets from American producers.

In other words, they are talking about protectionism. And if Chinese companies can’t buy American wind-power technology or pork-processing expertise, it’s hard to see what they would be allowed to buy.

New York Times