Ripe for disaster. Back before Covid, I had a conversation with my brother-in-law about his new backyard in Florida. “Well,” I said, “you have to get an orange tree.” Because what could be more Florida than that? I imagined waking up and picking the fruit myself, barefooted, sun shining in my hair. This was just what one did, I assumed, when one crossed the border into Florida, and we were a Florida family now.

“Oh,” said my brother-in-law, as if relaying some sad news about an acquaintance with cancer, “you don’t really see them down here anymore.”

That’s the day I learned about the plague devastating Florida’s citrus industry, which had been raging then for something like a decade. It was a sad story, I thought, though vaguely doubting it as bad as he described it. And, in any case, it was only a temporary problem, as are all sad stories in this country. Because this is America, and in America everything works out. Then, I pretty much didn’t think about the subject for another ten years.

But last week I randomly wondered how the state solved the crisis, which I assumed it must have done, conducted a little quick research for a brief dispatch — which, incredibly, I thought might make for a cute morning white pill — and holy shit is Big Orange fucked.

By the mid-20th Century, Florida oranges, which supplied most of the nation’s orange juice, had become much more than an agricultural product. From Walt’s branding the fruit into the identity of Disney World, which was built on orange groves, to Anita Bryant’s smiling face on television every morning imploring us to drink, oranges became a powerful symbol of American wellness, abundance, and prosperity. I myself have thought about the fruit, the kind of physical instantiation of American sunshine, in similar terms, which is probably why I’ve had such an oddly emotional reaction to news of reality.

Despite the industry’s hopeful predictions back in 2023, Florida orange farmers sold just a little more than 12 million boxes of fruit over the last year, a dramatic, unthinkable decline from 150 million boxes back in the early 2000s, or over 200 million boxes at the state’s peak in the 1970s.

The apparently intractable problem before us is an invasive pest called the Asian citrus psyllid, which spreads a bacterial infection called the “citrus greening disease,” first detected in our country back in 1998. Nothing we’ve tried has been able to stop it. But as wild and depressing as losing the citrus industry has been in its own right, the loss hints at an even greater danger. Namely, what if something similar happens to one of our staple crops like corn, wheat, or soy? It would be an unthinkable calamity, but then I didn’t think we’d lose our orange groves either.

What is the invasive pest with a taste for wheat we aren’t paying attention to? What is the deadly fungus being redesigned in a foreign lab? And how do we defend against threats we can’t even imagine let alone see?

In America, we don’t often think about food. Or, okay, we basically never stop thinking about food, but only in an embarrassing decadent “fall of Rome” sort of way. What we don’t do is worry about food. This is because we are not only living in a nation of abundant food, but a nation that has always, even in our brief moments of poverty, been relatively plentiful. Our country has more arable land than any other in the world, and has produced abundant crops and livestock across an enormous, geographically diverse continent from the founding. This mix of scale, decentralization, and resource abundance has insulated us from most systemic famine risk for as long as we’ve been able to rapidly transport goods. But over the last century, global trade has introduced a new kind of risk.

Consider this your Orange Alert.

Florida is a fascinating sort of invasive species hell. Maybe it’s the weather, warm and wet and all but inviting tropical killers from the orient or Africa. Maybe it’s the sort of… carefree spirit of the people there? I’m talking about the Florida Man, of course, a feral and Romantic archetype, imaginative, chaotic, a little meth-y sometimes if we’re being honest, and exactly the sort of person who buys exotic pets from the third world and frees them in his backyard, repeatedly, for many many years.

A couple summers ago, I wrote about this all at length in a piece called Dominion, paying particular attention to the impact of the state’s most well-known invader:

“There is however no invasive species more obviously devastating — or captivating to the wild-eyed Florida Man — than the Burmese python. Just three decades after its appearance in the Everglades, across a land mass roughly twice the size of New Jersey, raccoon, bobcat, deer, and opossum populations have crashed by between 90 and 99%. Marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes have been completely eradicated. The python even eats the region’s most famous apex predator, the alligator (though, to their credit, the alligators appear to eat them back). Today, the snake has expanded as far north as Tampa Bay, and threatens to overtake the entire American southeast.”

The python is a massive problem, though not yet deadly to humans. The same is true of oranges, lush and lovely as they are — a sad loss, but a loss we can survive. Still, the Asian psyllid does introduce us to a new class of problem: invasive pests that impact agriculture at scale. As we back into this much more significant danger, it’s worth taking a moment to really understand how Florida lost its oranges.

Citrus greening is a bacterial infection spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive bug that feeds on citrus leaves. Once infected, fruit born by the tree becomes misshapen and bitter. For two decades now, farmers have tried and failed to stop it in a number of ways, including insecticides, tree removal, the introduction of predatory pests (a tiny little wasp called tamarixia radiata), hybridizing trees and genetically modifying trees in service of making them more resistant to greening, nutrient supplements to boost tree immunity, and antibiotic treatments — which did find some limited success, but also raised a host of other issues. There has recently, just this year, been a bit of limited success in the creation of citrus greening resistant orange tree varieties, which is not to say new trees that are immune, but a little more robust.

Clearly, the best defense against the psyllid was to keep the psyllid out of our country. We failed. We do not want to fail again. So how did it get here?

Because the word “Asian” is in the pest’s name, and China has a recent history of biological warfare programs gone wrong (that is, unless you are one of those conspiracy theorists who believes Covid did not come from a lab), the internet commentariat, wherever this issue is raised, points to the CCP. The most popular position seems to be China destroyed Florida’s oranges on purpose. I don’t see much evidence to support this position.

Citrus greening was first detected in China in the early 20^th Century, just before it rapidly spread throughout Asia. It reached Africa by the 1940s, and the Middle East by the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it hit Florida in notable force by the early 2000s, and with recent cases of the disease popping up in Spain we can assume Europe is next. With greening spread around the world over the course of a century the obvious culprit is trade, which means we can blame, if anything, globalism.

That said, weaponizing some other blight like the greening bacterium would be trivially easy, if difficult to contain, and we have some recent evidence, if not proof, that China is thinking about this class of danger.

Just a few months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Yunqing Jian, a postdoctoral researcher in Michigan, and Zunyong Liu, based in China, with conspiring to smuggle Fusarium graminearum into the United States without permits. This is a fungus that causes head blight in wheat. Prosecutors alleged Liu carried fungal samples through Detroit Metropolitan Airport for use in a University of Michigan lab, while Jian helped coordinate the effort. Because the pathogen could potentially harm our staple crops, officials described it as a potential “agroterrorism weapon.” Jian was arrested in the U.S., while Liu remains abroad, and the case is still moving through federal court.

But Fusarium graminearum is common in the United States. While the Chinese students are undoubtedly embroiled in some sort of espionage operation — I am once again asking: why are these people here? — on closer study I think the CCP is probably trying to leverage US resources and knowledge to spin up a better defensive strategy at home.

In the service of defending their food supply, China has a long history of stealing our shit. Some recent bangers in the genre: Mo Hailong stole corn secrets from Monsanto in 2016, for which we sent his ass to prison; Weiqiang Zhang stole genetically engineered rice seeds from Ventria Biosciences, and was convicted in 2017; and Haitao Xiang stole a proprietary crop-modeling algorithm in 2022.

My theory, other than, well, the Chinese just sort of steal everything, is — in diametric contrast with the United States — they’re uniquely worried about food, with a history so foreign to us the average American genuinely can’t understand their behavior. China has about 300 million acres of arable land, or something like 0.2 acres per person. This is less than half the global average, which is something like 0.47 acres per person, and about 17% of the American average, which is something like 1.16 acres per person. In a world before cheap global trade, any time that country suffered a little dry spell, or a flood, or a violent political revolution, it was looking at mass starvation.

Indeed, over the last 150 years, there have been multiple major Chinese famines, each of which resulted in millions, or even tens of millions dead: the Northern Chinese Famine in 1876; the “Great” North China Famine in 1928; the Henan Famine in 1942; and most recently the Great Chinese Famine in 1959, which left between 15 and 55 million dead (numbers tend to deflate into the low double digit millions when you ask a communist). My dad was born in 1949. My mom was born in 1955. Most boomers were alive for this.

Food scarcity, a fear of food scarcity, reaction to food scarcity is in a sense the entire Chinese history, including its very recent history. This means the Chinese people are not only motivated by food, with food scarcity a major and emotional political issue in the country, but especially keyed into what happens to a country without food. Much as US anxiety over nuclear weapons, which we created, led to mass proliferation, is it possible Chinese anxiety over mass starvation has led to military thinking in this vein? The concept isn’t even new.

Right after World War II, the United States researched multiple forms of “anti-crop” biological weapons, not only including specific funguses (many of them more colloquially referred to as “rusts”) targeting various cereals, but bombs capable of delivering the blights, before spearheading and signing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Japan, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all have a history experimenting on anti-crop technology, with the former Soviet Union apparently leading the charge from the 1920s through the 1990s, employing tens of thousands of personnel and building the largest stockpile of biological weapons in history.

I think there is like a zero percent chance the CCP isn’t secretly working on this stuff, and if China invades Taiwan, I think there is a very good chance we suddenly come down with a bunch of weird wheat infections. It doesn’t matter if the CCP has been spying on our agricultural science for the last decade or so in order to better feed the Chinese people. It’s safe to assume the Chinese government is aware of every newly modified crop we’re working on, and every crop’s weakness. The threat of agricultural warfare — which is an existential risk — therefore exists, even if it isn’t present. This means, in addition to focusing on diseases we’re aware of, we need to be working on a system capable of responding rapidly to new invasive threats.

Unfortunately, this is our modern political discourse:

A typical contribution from center left (is he though?) thinkboy Matt Yglesias.

Okay. First, I should note the major value of Florida’s orange industry is its industry, not the oranges. Mine is not only an argument in favor of the resources and jobs that industry brings to our country, but in the security domestic agriculture affords. Then, it’s important to note as well the incredible irony in decrying tariffs on imported produce following a blight we almost certainly acquired from imported citrus.

But while Matt’s was the most obnoxious response to my initial note on the subject, it shared something in common with reaction across the ideological spectrum. In quote tweets, from government conspiracies to blaming various politicians from various states, none of whom had anything to do with this, a great number of people seem incapable of facing any specific, new danger free of other random political bullshit. This is Internet Brain, which Americans can unfortunately not blame on globalism, as we invented it ourselves.

But the citrus industry’s crisis in Florida has nothing to do with Trump’s tariffs or Biden’s open borders. I also doubt even the average extremist from either political pole would be uninterested in novel solutions to citrus greening. They just, I don’t know, can’t seem to focus on anything that doesn’t track to what they’re mad about on X today. But we have to look at this as a unique problem, and fix it.

Roughly, that probably looks like maintaining our presently robust mix of smaller family farms, which count for the overwhelming majority of farms in our country, and giant centralized farms, which account for the majority of production. Too much reliance on either poses greater risk, with smaller farms lacking the uniform decision-making required to defend entire regions from some immediate new danger along some given set of standards, and larger farms generally weaker to single blights due to the monoculture innate of scale. It feels like sort of a copout, but my gut read is we should probably avoid further decentralization and centralization of U.S. agriculture. We’re maybe in a kind of Goldilocks zone right now, and should do our best to stay put.

Mostly, however, America needs the capability to immediately assess novel invasive threats, spin up solutions in gene drives, and deploy the solutions. Here, I think there’s a role for the federal government. And “BioForce” goes hard as hell. Trump? Come on, big guy, we all know you love a cute branding moment, and imagine all the nice things our grandchildren will say about the man who saved the world from mass starvation.

In any case, we do have to think about this.

While American citrus still has miles to plummet before we reach the bottom, the next big crop failure might not be a sweet treat, and could constitute something more substantial. Then, the responsible party won’t really matter. We’ll still have to deal with the consequences, and in this we can look to China for some sense of the risk: millions of lives.

Food for thought.

-SOLANA