Chinese “Seed Spy” Gets Three Years in Prison
A years-long plot to steal hybrid corn seed just landed a Chinese national in federal prison for three years.
In this case it was a Chinese national named Mo Hailong, aka Robert Mo, who was trying to steal patented corn seed for the Chinese bioengineering firm Dabeinong Technology Group Company (DBN), which he worked for, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mo, a legal resident of the U.S. who was the director of international business for DBN, was sentenced this week in U.S District Court in Des Moines to three years in federal prison followed by three years of probation and an as-yet-to-be-determined-amount of restitution for conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
This charge stemmed from a years-long plot, which began in April 2011, to steal high-yield, pest resistant bio-engineered corn seeds worth millions of dollars and bred by Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, and LG Seeds, according to the FBI. The conspiracy allegedly involved seven other Chinese nationals – including Mo’s sister, Mo Yun, the wife of the billionaire head of DBN, Shao Genhuo, according to eastern Iowa’s The Gazette. Her case was later dropped for lack of evidence and she, and the six others, have since returned to China where there is no extradition treaty with the U.S.
The FBI determined that Mo had shipped more than 1,000 pounds of U.S. corn seed to China, and it was later counterfeited by scientists working for DBN. In October 2014, Nicholas Klinefeldt, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, told Al Jazeera America’s America Tonight that the “information that was stolen in this case has an estimated value of five to eight years worth of research time. And a minimum of $30 to $40 million.”
The seed-stealing caper began to unravel in May 2011 when a DuPont Pioneer field manager found Mo crawling through an unmarked research field near Tama, Iowa. When confronted, Mo claimed he worked for the University of Iowa and was on his way to an agricultural conference. He and another man, Wang Lei, the vice chairman of Kings Nower Seeds, a subsidiary of DBN, fled in a car through a ditch when the field manager became distracted by a phone call, according to court documents. After an FBI investigation that included placing GPS tracking devices on the suspects’ vehicles and bugging their phones, the FBI was able to identify Mo off his rental car’s license plate.
“Mo Hailong stole valuable proprietary information in the form of seed corn from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto in an effort to transport such trade secrets to China. Theft of trade secrets is a serious federal crime, as it harms victim companies that have invested millions of dollars and years of work toward the development of propriety technology. The theft of agricultural trade secrets, and other intellectual property, poses a grave threat to our national economic security,” said U.S. Attorney Kevin E. VanderSchel in a press release.
In court on Wednesday, Mo gave a tearful statement to Judge Stephanie Rose, telling her that it had been his dream to spend the rest of his life in the U.S. after he settled here in 1998, and that “I have destroyed everything that I worked for,” according to The Des Moines Register.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Andrew Amelinckx, Modern Farmer
October 11, 2016
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.