Starting with garlic, hold China accountable for its gross environmental practices

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – China has gross environmental practices, and Americans are eating the consequences.

At the turn of the year, news hit that Chinese garlic sold in American grocery stores is grown in feces, potentially even of human origin.

This prompted our own U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to call for a federal investigation into the safety of consuming the product and, meanwhile, halt its sale in U.S. supermarkets. 

Queasy? Yeah, me too.

This is just the latest in a growing list of environmental grievances against China, who by and large skirt the basic environmental and labor practices that America and its allies abide by.

This is an affront to Americans’ health and the hard work of U.S. producers, and we cannot allow it any longer.

As a Republican who believes we should take seriously the call to put “America First,” I believe we should be holding China accountable for all its malpractices.

U.S. leaders have been working to address this in intellectual property and tech, and we should hold China to account for its varying environmental abuses as well.

On this, there are so many fronts to address, from food to energy to minerals and more.

Food-wise, there’s more stink than just fecal garlic.

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott has been working with his Senate colleagues to investigate and ban chemically laced seafood from China.

Separately, Chinese fishermen have just last month been caught spiking fishing shoals with toxic cyanide, to poison ecosystems and push out other nations from the market. 

Energy-wise, China is working to dominate global energy production, but with a dirty twist. While they are by far the world’s largest solar panel producer, their production is far more intensive in terms of carbon pollution than U.S. production.

They’re able to flood markets with cheap goods produced under little to no environmental standards – and not just for solar panels but across manufacturing more broadly.

On top of that, there’s serious suspicion that China’s solar panels are done with Uygur slave labor. This is why Florida Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have moved to get the U.S. out of Chinese production.

In terms of rare earth minerals, China dominates supply chains.

This is not just a major national security risk, because of the CCP’s ability to restrict supplies to essential technologies like batteries, microprocessors, to missiles, and more. It’s also an environmental offense; Chinese mining is more than two times more polluting than American mining.

Thankfully, Florida’s own Republican members of Congress – Daniel Webster, Cory Mills, Michael Waltz, Carlos Gimenez, Byron Donalds and Maria Salazar – are already working to advance a series of efforts to bolster critical mineral production domestically and get the U.S. out of this precarious situation. 

China’s M-O is to win, and they’re willing to defy western environmental standards across sectors to do it.

It’s high time to push back, and I applaud the leaders who are working to do this. 

To go further, we should be holding China directly accountable for their pollution. This is an approach that leaders from former President Donald Trump’s administration have long been supportive of, and something our statehouse just passed a memorial in support of.

With hard-on-China trade tools like foreign pollution fees, we could bring to light a very troubling aspect of Chinese production and halt the U.S. from being undercut by China’s environmental practices.

Unless you like your garlic with a side of feces, it’s time to step up and ensure China isn’t getting a free pass.

Or maybe, as Waltz has said, “When you see ‘made in China,’ put it down.”

Stan McClain is the Florida state representative for District 27.