OPINION:
On Aug. 1, Syngenta, one of the world’s largest agricultural seed and crop protection companies, replaced its chief executive.
Out went Jeff Rowe, a fifth-generation farmer from Princeton, Illinois, whom Syngenta had long presented as its American face. In came Hengde Qin, a member of Syngenta Group’s executive team since 2020, who previously held CEO roles at two publicly traded Chinese companies.
Outside the agricultural trade press, hardly anyone noticed — but the move had consequences that affected every American.
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Syngenta is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and over the years, that Swiss address has done a lot of work. ChemChina bought the company in 2017 for $43 billion, the largest overseas acquisition in Chinese history.
ChemChina has since been folded into Sinochem Holdings, a state-owned enterprise supervised directly by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, the body through which the Chinese Communist Party controls its largest companies.
Syngenta’s own reporting shows where decisions are actually made. According to its 2025 environmental, social and governance report, the “Swiss” company no longer has an executive team of its own. Operational management sits with the leadership of Syngenta Group Co. Ltd., registered in Shanghai, and the Shanghai board sets the Swiss company’s strategic direction.
At the end of last year, every member of the Shanghai board also sat on the Swiss board. The same man chaired both and chairs Sinochem Holdings itself.
Syngenta is not merely a Swiss company with a Chinese shareholder. It is an instrument of the Chinese state now run by a longtime executive of its Chinese parent company.
When the deal cleared U.S. national security review in 2016, under the Obama administration, CCP control over a major American agricultural supplier could be dismissed as theoretical. Since then, a decade of civil-military fusion, Chinese laws compelling corporate cooperation with the state and now a Sinochem executive in the driver’s seat have made the risks concrete.
Control and executive authority matter precisely because of what Syngenta owns. The Trump administration has established that the inputs to American food are a national security concern. The National Farm Security Action Plan rests on the premise that farm security is national security.
In February, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to secure a domestic supply of elemental phosphorus — used in military munitions and crop protection products—as well as domestic capacity for glyphosate-based herbicide manufacturing. With only one domestic producer, the administration treated that single point of failure as the strategic vulnerability it is.
Syngenta presents that vulnerability in a sharper form. Some of the most widely used herbicides in American corn production depend on specialized chemistries that few facilities can handle, including Syngenta’s major production plant in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, about 10 miles south of Baton Rouge.
Herbicides used across much of the Corn Belt are largely produced at a facility ultimately controlled by Beijing. This vulnerability extends to seed treatments and to other herbicides and fungicides widely used in American agriculture.
None of this requires imagining sabotage. The leverage is the dependency itself. A foreign state that controls a critical supplier can slow shipments, reprice them or simply hold that possibility over a trading partner in a crisis.
Beijing has already done exactly this with rare earths, and nothing exempts agricultural inputs.
The understandable response from industry is that Syngenta has been a reliable supplier for decades. Yet reliability in peacetime proves little. The question is who decides whether these products arrive when Washington and Beijing are at odds. Today, that decision rests with a board in Shanghai and a chairman who also runs a Chinese state conglomerate.
The administration has acted on this logic with phosphorus and the recently announced Seed Sovereignty Initiative. It did not wait for supply to fail before treating a single point of failure as a national security problem.
American farmers deserve the same foresight applied to the company at the foundation of their supply chain.
The Syngenta case differs from phosphorus and seeds in one respect. Those actions address a choke point where the problem is supply. Syngenta is a choke point where the problem is ownership. It calls for different tools.
None of this requires Congress. Our own government already lists Syngenta’s parent, ChemChina, as a Chinese military company on the grounds that the Chinese state indirectly owns it. Syngenta is ultimately under state ownership, yet the parent carries the designation, while the subsidiary that sells into American agriculture operates without it.
Washington has already made the judgment. It just has not yet followed that finding to its obvious conclusion.
The administration has done the hard part. It has been established that the entity controlling American agricultural inputs is a national security question, and it has shown that it is willing to act.
Syngenta is the largest unanswered piece of that question. For years, an Illinois farmer gave the company an American face. Now that the mask is gone, we see the company for what it is. It is time to act to protect the American food supply.
• Adam Savit is director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as senior adviser for national security to the secretary of agriculture.
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