China Destroyed 95% of Florida's Oranges
They're Already Waging Biological War
Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article is less history-focused than recent ones, and gets back to our roots: articles exposing something that Americans ought know, but don’t, such as Bill Barr’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein or how private equity is destroying medical care in America. Much in that mold, today’s article is how a biological agent from China has utterly decimated classic Florida oranges. As always, please make sure to like this article by tapping the heart at the top of the page, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Thanks again!
If you enjoy the delicious, refreshing taste of Florida’s classic oranges or the juice made from them, you might have noticed a relative dearth of them as of late. That’s not to say they’re not around; they are. But they’re less common at the stores, with bags of fruit from elsewhere taking their place. Specialized sellers like Hale Groves send fewer advertisements and have ever less inventory. Why?
Because China is waging biological warfare on the United States.
Yes, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) did to the orange crop what it just tried doing to the wheat crop (CCP-connected saboteurs tried to smuggle wheat blight into the Upper Northwest in an act of what the DOJ called “agroterrorism”1), releasing a plague that has wiped out close to 100% of Florida’s orange groves, once the fruit for which the state was renowned.
The biological weapon that has detonated like a nuclear bomb in Florida and slowly spread across the other orange growing regions of the country—namely, Texas and California—is, much like the recent form of “agroterrorism,” a form of blight. This one, originating in what’s now the PRC, is called “huanglongbing” (HLB). Or, in our tongue, “citrus greening.”2
HLB is a nasty pestilence—in this case, a bacterium—that is spread by a gnat-sized type of bug called the Psyllid. In this case, the particular insect responsible is the Asian citrus psyllid.3 Once it infects a tree, the tree cannot be saved; it must be burned to wipe away the bacteria, meaning that often entire groves of the treasured trees must go up in flames to deal with the citrus blight.4
Notably, the bacteria and bug that carry it were discovered in the early 1900s, but were long present only in what is now the PRC. As Chinese citrus growers knew to expect it and were used to dealing with it, the problem was relatively contained over there and causes continual but non-catastrophic losses.5
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![[AUDIO] China Destroyed 95% of Florida's Oranges](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F165878627%2F2e8a88a6-a5b5-4b23-b2ed-c02cd8587969%2Ftranscoded-1749832777.png)
The situation is quite different in America. Here, HLB and the Asian psyllid didn’t appear in Florida until around the turn of the 21st century, with the best estimates putting its arrival around the late ‘90s. At that point, the trees started dying, with their leaves falling off, branches shriveling, and fruits becoming ugly and deformed. In the beginning, the farmers thought the citrus-destroying bacteria was no big deal, as the trees are resilient and the Florida climate is perfect for citrus growing.6 But the citrus carnage never stopped. Like a slowly exploding nuclear bomb, the HLB bacteria that suspiciously washed up on our shores with no convincing reason as to how it got here legitimately has destroyed about 90% of the Florida orange industry.
The 1997-98 growing season, the last to occur before the HLB plague began, was Florida’s peak period of citrus production. That season saw a whopping 304 million boxes of citrus fruits grown. Then the Chinese psyllids started flying, and within a decade, production had crashed by a third, falling to under 204 million boxes for the year. The grove deaths were far from over. As the pestilence relentlessly marched on, Florida struggled to even hold its ground, much less recover. As of the 2017-18 growing season, Florida managed to produce just 49.5 million boxes of citrus fruit. That represented an 86% decline in just 20 years.7
Florida’s orange crop has been particularly hard hit. As of the last pre-HLB season, the 1997-98 growing season, 244 million boxes of oranges alone were produced. As of 2024, the state only managed to produce 12 million oranges, a decline of around 95%.8
The productive citrus acreage has fallen as well, though not as sharply. According to the USDA, as of 2000, the peak, about 832,000 acres were devoted to citrus production. As of the 2024 season, just 275,000 acres were in production, a collapse of around two-thirds.9
Similarly, around 2/3 of processing and packing plants have shut down, thousands of farmers have thrown in the towel, tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs, and the remainder of the industry has faced similarly dire losses.10 And that's just in Florida: the same process is now playing out in Texas and California, and overall American citrus production has fallen by about 90%.11
That is a dramatic reversal from under three decades ago, when the citrus industry was at its peak and all seemed well, with Americans consistently loving the delicious fruit produced by the resilient trees. Now there is desert where once there were productive trees, and over $3.5 billion has been destroyed in Florida alone, all because of a bug and bacteria brought here from China.12
Tragically, no cure for the blight has been found. There is some hope that a certain fertilizer could help,13 and others think a gene from the spinach plant could prove effective in fighting the citrus contagion.14 But that is still just hope, and at this point, with insecticides and antibiotics proving ineffective,15 it looks like the groves of traditional Florida oranges will have to be destroyed and replaced by GMO oranges if there is to be any chance of success in keeping orange production alive.16
Thus, a bacteria-driven blight has caused an utter collapse in an industry that provided a fruit Americans quite enjoy in large quantities, bringing a formerly prosperous industry led by archetypal American farmers to its knees. And that bacteria is here thanks to the PRC.
Was It Intentional?
The multi-billion dollar question, the question that really gets down to the matter of whether this was a consequence of globalization or an act of biological warfare, is whether the spread of the HBL bacteria and the Asian psyllid that carries it was intentional or accidental.
On one hand, such things do happen without the nefarious involvement of the state, particularly when a minuscule insect is to blame. Alligator snapping turtles have somehow ended up in England,17 Asian carp are now a massive problem, but were first brought here to deal with algae,18 and the kudzu that has swallowed the South was first an ornamental vine brought here from the Orient.19 So, perhaps HBL and its insect host accidentally came here on something like orange jasmine, an ornamental landscape plant, and the collapse of our famed citrus industry is purely an accident. This is the conclusion most who don’t want to think about the issue draw.
But that seems unlikely, as an “agroterrorism” attack of this sort is exactly what is in China’s wheelhouse, and what it has said it will do as part of its “unrestricted warfare” playbook.
China’s Unrestricted Warfare
In 1999, right around the time HBL was first discovered in America and PRC-USA tensions were somewhat high,20 two PRC officers released a paper titled “Unrestricted Warfare.” The paper is quite long, so in the interest of brevity, its core focus is on how the PRC can wage war more successfully by playing outside the traditional rules of war and utilizing the full spectrum of targets and power to bring enemies to their knees.21
As relevant here, that understanding of national power and attackable targets includes using subversion and obfuscation to attack the economy of enemy powers, such as the United States. Further, it involves doing so while in a technical state of peace, as the authors noted that much of the subversion and espionage tactics can be done, so long as enough obfuscation is used,22 in such away that they cause great harm to the target nation while staying below the threshold of escalation to full war.
While that economic aspect of “Unrestricted Warfare” was traditionally understood to mean gaining a step up and avoiding onerous R&D costs through stealing industrial and technological secrets,23 it is far broader than that and includes waging “asymmetric warfare in unexpected verticals,” such as agriculture.24 In such an understanding of war and tactics, the PRC would not hesitate to, if it could get away with it, release a bacteria that destroys 90% of a multi-billion dollar industry.
In fact, the House Oversight Committee has found that the PRC is already in a position to wage such “unrestricted warfare” on America’s agricultural sector generally, finding, in a 2024 report: “USDA’s failure to address CCP unrestricted warfare against U.S. agriculture is unacceptable given the CCP’s efforts are not new. For decades, the communist regime has interfered with agricultural production.”25
Further, the same report found that the USDA has not remained vigilant about protecting American farmers from China’s unrestricted wafare strategy: “USDA overlooks the CCP’s efforts to exploit America’s food security because the PRC is America’s biggest agricultural customer, and USDA does not want to offend America’s top customer.”26 Indeed, “USDA officials told the Committee they do not offer trainings about CCP infiltration and influence operations targeting American agriculture and food supply.”27
So, America is in a position where it is clear that the PRC is engaged in “unrestricted warfare targeting American agricultural industries,”28 and that such a strategy would involve weakening our agricultural sector by releasing pestilences into it,29 so long as enough obfuscation could be used to prevent American retaliation.30 Weakening the enemy while staying below the threshold for escalation is, after all, much of the point of “unrestricted warfare,” so it is, of course, what they not only would do but are currently doing.
The Wages of Unrestricted War
With that “unrestricted warfare” strategy in mind, some of the various pestilences and infestations America faces make far more sense, particularly when understood in light of the USDA remaining intentionally inattentive to such matters.
For example, the Spotted Lanternfly is another bug originally from China that, like the havoc-wreaking Asian psyllid, mysteriously showed up in America31 and started causing immense damage. Namely, the spotted lanternflies secrete a waste that attracts wasps and “leads to the growth of sooty mold and black-colored fungi,” and they cause the death of the plants on which they feed, such as “grapevines, maples, black walnut, birch and willow.”32 While that sounds more like an annoyance than a disaster, the cost is severe: Pennsylvania found the cost to it alone was well over $300 million as of 2019.33 Similarly, the cost to the homeowners affected by the flies is substantial.34 So, it is unclear how the flies got here, but we know they 1) came from China, 2) are doing immense economic damage, and 3) because their origin is unclear, the escalatory threshold hasn’t been reached. All in all, that is an attack straight out of the “unrestricted warfare” playbook.
Another example is the emerald ash borer, yet another highly destructive bug from China. Like the others, it appears to have arrived in America as part of the trade process (in this case, wooden shipping crates), and has since killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across America.35 That one bug alone has ravaged entire forests, and the cost of fixing it is likely well over $10 billion.36 So, if the “accidental” inclusion of the bugs in the shipping crates was a covert, purposeful act carried out as part of the “unrestricted warfare” playbook, then it worked great. If it was purposeful, China did the economic equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier37 with just a few beetles.
Most recently, China smuggled wheat blight into Michigan.38 The threat posed by the bacteria is serious enough that the DOJ is referring to it as an act of “agroterrorism,” which is really an understatement given that blight can wipe out entire cereal crops if it manages to spread unchecked.39 Had it worked, that would have been a perfect play in the “unrestricted warfare” playbook, given the damage to the American economy and unprepared world food markets. Fortunately for us, the CCP-connected researchers with the blight were caught, and now we know that the PRC is waging agricultural warfare on the United States.
That brings us back to HLB and its insect carrier. There is no smoking gun, as there is with the wheat blight, showing that the citrus blight was brought here intentionally by the PRC. But we know both that the PRC is doing such things as part of its unrestricted warfare attacks upon us, as shown by the recent case and the House Oversight report, and that the economic cost of those attacks is monumental. In this case, it has so far caused billions of dollars in damages and destroyed 90% of a once-thriving industry while massively increasing our reliance on GMO crops. Perhaps that is unintentional, but it would line right up with an unrestricted warfare-style attack like the one they were just caught in.
There’s No Escaping Unrestricted Warfare
I have no desire to fight a war with China. Dying off the coast of Formosa for unclear reasons, given that we could and should just make the semiconductors here,40 isn’t on my bucket list. Important to remember, however, is that the PRC is thinking that way too. Burdened by a rock-bottom fertility rate, terrible demographics due to the one-child policy, and an economy that relies on exporting goods and importing fuel and food, even a successful invasion of the Republic of China would be a disaster for them if it were long, bloody, or both.
Hence, unrestricted warfare. To them, war doesn’t just mean ships, tanks, and planes firing at each other. It doesn’t even mean that plus cyberwarfare and proxy conflicts, as we’re growing accustomed to. It means covert blows against every important enemy vertical, from political stability to food production. It means weakening us so that no war is necessary, and doing so with pinprick blows that draw enough blood to hurt but not enough to cause shooting-war-style retaliation.
Every suspicious bacteria or bug from China, not to mention propaganda and technology from them, should be viewed through that lens. Is it really that all these insects and the diseases they carry just happened to get here through our porous border and do tens of billions of dollars in damage once here? Is it really an accident that Florida orange production is down 95%? Perhaps, but that seems unlikely. What seems much more likely, sadly, is that unrestricted warfare is working exactly as intended and that it’s the reason you can’t find Florida oranges.
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Why Rhodesia Had to Declare Independence
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This is when we bombed their embassy in Serbia: https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-china-relations; describing the tensions generally: https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1999/02/28/u-s-china-tensions-rising/50533142007/
Steinman notes this here: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1930264566191272359
Citing this RAND paper: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1708.html
Joshua Steinman, an Iraq veteran now focused on defending American industry from Chinese sabotage, notes this here: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1930020734593839316
Pg 133, same report
Pg 134, same report
Pg 138, same report
As noted by Steinman here: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1930020734593839316
The current speculation is that it somehow came over on a stone shipment: https://cals.cornell.edu/integrated-pest-management/outreach-education/whats-bugging-you/spotted-lanternfly/spotted-lanternfly-reported-distribution-map#:~:text=Spotted%20lanternfly%20(SLF)%2C%20Lycorma,altissima%2C%20or%20Tree%20of%20Heaven.
The cost of a modern supercarrier is around $13 billion, around the cost the government found (in the study above) will be paid to deal with the emereld ash borers
Some discussion of this here:
Great Powers Can Have Tariffs Or Die
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I've worked in the food industry for 30 years and long heard lamenting about the declining citrus crop in Florida. But never heard this take on it. It sounds more than plausible.
The first question that comes to mind is whether other citrus growing regions (Brazil, Spain, Italy) are facing similar pestilence. If they are, especially if their standing with CCP is at least neutral if not positive, then it's likely a consequence of globalism. However, if this is mostly affecting US growers, then it's suspicious.
Given the arrests announced this week, the safe assumption is that CCP has definitely deployed biowarfare against us.
On the Ash tree devastation; I’ve always had reservations about describing the death of these ash trees in purely economic terms, dampening the way we interacted with the Ash. Namely the tree was one of the most popular street trees, lining the boulevards of cities. The tree was also a major timber for wood working, commonly used for interior furniture and baseball bats.
For another instance of an American tree being destroyed by a Chinese disease, admittedly this happened in the early 1900s, so likely an instance of self inflicted harm, look into the American Chestnut. It used to be one of the major trees in eastern forests, a major timber producer, and food crop. But the desire for a chestnut tree with a larger nut resulted in New Yorkers shipping in Chinese Chestnut, which was contaminated with chestnut blight. In 3 decades all the Chestnut stands were wiped out, and we’ve been trying to create a resistant variety ever since. The blight only kills the vascular tissue of the tree above the soil, so old roots will still put out new shoots of growth that will die shortly, haunting the forests they used to grow in.