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.
I read Mike Solana because he's good at this thing called internet writing. And because he often picks up kinda weird stories And convinces me that they are important.
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.
This article isn't really about oranges. It oamt even about invasive species...so much.
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.
It's about how nations have used crop destruction as a weapon in the past and his they might use it again.
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.
The world is a dynamic system, and while it's a fool's errand to try to hold it in stasis, we do want to keep the dynamism from doing something that makes it radically more difficult for humans to stay alive. It's not generally how we approach these things, though:
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.
Sadly, Solana's solution is...a new government agency.