Food and Peace

By ART CULLEN

Tensions were running especially high when we suggested awhile back that Chinese leader Xi Jinping should sit down for supper with his old friends from Iowa, which he visited as a young regional technocrat 38 years ago. Food brings people together. Iowa is the biggest supplier of pork and soy to China. When misunderstandings arise it is always good to sit down and talk over food.

Turns out, a delegation of Iowans was invited to San Francisco in mid-November for a supper with Xi and President Joe Biden. It includes many of the people who hosted Xi when he first visited Iowa to learn more about production agriculture. “This has been a heck of a journey — we can’t figure it out. We don’t even know why he likes us!” Sarah Lande told reporter Jennifer Jacobs. Sarah, now 85, and her husband Roger hosted Xi at their Muscatine farm on his first visit, coordinated by then-Gov. Terry Branstad.

Branstad was invited to the supper as well. He served as ambassador to China during the Trump Administration. This homecoming of sorts could not have happened without the support of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

It’s part of an effort to repair a relationship that has become dangerously frayed over the past decade over trade, human rights and threats to Taiwan. A trade war launched during the Trump Administration undermined decades of relationship-building among Iowa ag interests and Asia. It confirmed Chinese suspicions that the United States will use food as a trade weapon, prompting it to shift trade to South America. All the tough talk led to fears of military confrontation.

China needs food and agricultural technology. It has a restive population that demands more protein from a food system challenged by natural resource depletion and climate change. We must come together to find a way to feed a growing world population and calm conflict.

The Middle East is exploding into what may be an expanded war as the US strikes bases in Syria manned by Iran and stocked by Russia. Bombs rain down on Ukraine and into the Gaza Strip. The civil war in Yemen could not continue were it not for the US and China backing Saudi Arabia and Iran as proxies. The United States and China can do a lot to stop the bombs.

Iowans can help focus our attention where it needs to be: on our common interests. China in the near term needs food from Iowa; in the long term its top national goal is food self-sufficiency. That’s why the Iowans are on the guest list. As purveyors of food and ways to produce it in a rapidly changing environment, Iowans bring value to the table as pragmatic friends who want peace and sovereignty. Citizen diplomacy put Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev at a lunch table on the Roswell Garst farm during the height of the Cold War. Krushchev marveled at Iowa ag productivity. It helped to keep the guns at bay. Likewise, Xi was impressed with what he saw. We also have learned a lot about food system resiliency in the past couple decades, and how we can collaborate to feed people without taking out the Brazilian rain forest.

It’s good to keep talking. US and China military commanders have resumed their communications. China just ordered up a jumbo tonnage of soy just ahead of the Biden-Xi summit. These are good steps. We hope that it leads to more joint agricultural and food exchanges that lead to understanding and progress. The first order of maintaining the peace is making certain that people are fed. It is gratifying and important that Iowa has a seat at the table. We hope it can lead to a reprise of Xi’s visit to Iowa and a strengthening of bridges between world superpowers.

Reasoning with China starts with food, plain and simple. President Biden and Secretary Vilsack are smart to recognize it and leverage the relationship that Branstad, Lande et al. built with Xi over the years (he has remained in correspondence with the Landes for nearly four decades). It is easier to talk about human rights, Taiwan and Iran on a full stomach. Xi may be more reasonable knowing that the United States is a reliable supplier of crop staples when Russia is not, and that the key to gaining influence in the developing world is through sustainable food production. What a tremendous opportunity for peace.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2023

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