A Chinese biotech outsourcing company (CXO) with military ties recently purchased a large piece of land in Florida to build a monkey breeding and quarantine facility.
Florida newspaper Citrus County Chronicle reported on Sept. 22 that JOINN Laboratories, a Chinese CXO pharmaceutical company, purchased a 1,400-acre parcel of land in Levy County in July for $5.5 million to build the facility for primates, mostly experimental monkeys.
However, the site is designated as forestry or rural residential zoning, while Levy County only allows research laboratories in its industrial zone. Stacey Hectus, the county’s planning and zoning director, said that JOINN had been told the site was not suitable for its intended use before the purchase.
“They asked to rezone the property but I stated that a request such as that would not be looked upon favorably by staff because of compatibility and spot-zoning,” Hectus told Citrus County Chronicle. Moreover, because the land was more than 50 acres, the rezoning application needs to be reviewed by the state.
An Epoch Times reporter called the headquarters of JOINN Laboratories in China for comment on what they planned to now do but did not receive any response.
Lab Monkey Shortage
The land purchase comes at a time when China’s contract research organizations (CRO) have been facing a shortage of lab monkeys amid soaring prices.
According to Chinese media reports, the price of an experimental monkey in China has risen from more than 40,000 yuan (about $5,500) to more than 120,000 yuan (about $16,600) in less than two years, prompting CROs to scramble for lab monkey resources.
In April, prior to the land purchase, JOINN Laboratories spent 1.805 billion yuan (approximately $250 million) in China to acquire two lab animal breeding companies. The acquisitions sent stock prices soaring, as the two companies altogether owned roughly 20,000 experimental monkeys.
Chinese Military Background
According to public information, JOINN Laboratories’ founder and chairwoman Feng Yuxia has a U.S. green card. Feng and her husband Zhou Zhiwen, co-founder of the company, both graduated from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) with a degree in pharmacology. Feng worked at AMMS’ Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology from 1992 to 1995, whereas her husband worked as a researcher from 1989 to 1993.
Zuo Conglin, the general manager of JOINN Laboratories, also graduated from AMMS and worked at the Institute of Aeromedical Research of the Chinese Air Force from 1989 to 1996.
Founded in 1995, JOINN Laboratories is believed to be the first drug safety evaluation company in China and received good laboratory practice (GLP) certification from the FDA of the United States in 2009. It is expanding its operations in the United States and globally while claiming to serve as a bridge assisting Chinese pharmaceutical companies going abroad.
Development and Acquisitions in US
According to Bloomberg’s corporate information, JOINN Laboratories California was founded in 2013, and JOINN Biologics US, also based in the San Francisco Bay Area, was founded in 2018. They offer comprehensive services for all phases of drug development.
Their parent company, JOINN Laboratories, claims on its website that it is a leading clinical and non-clinical CRO.
From May to December 2019, JOINN Laboratories completed the acquisition of the preclinical CRO business of Boston-area Biomere, paying $27.3 million, 100 percent cash. Chinese state media commented that it was the lowest cost and most effective way to enter the North American market.
Biomere is one of the top three preclinical CROs in New England and one of the few preclinical CROs in the region to conduct primate trials, with a client base that includes major pharmaceutical companies such as Shire, Novartis, and Abbott.
Following the acquisition, JOINN California expanded Biomere’s preclinical CRO business from the East Coast to the West Coast, took over Biomere’s former customers, and developed new markets.
US Executive Order on New Biotech Goals
This comes as the U.S. government has recently stepped up measures to protect bioeconomic security.
U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on Sept.12 aimed at “advancing biotechnology and biomanufacturing innovation for a sustainable, safe, and secure American bioeconomy.”
“We must safeguard the United States bioeconomy, as foreign adversaries and strategic competitors alike use legal and illegal means to acquire United States technologies and data, including biological data, and proprietary or precompetitive information, which threatens United States economic competitiveness and national security,” it stated.
Two days later, on Sept 14, the White House held a summit with various departments, to discuss key steps to advance the executive order, with funding of more than $2 billion, “to lower prices, create good jobs, strengthen supply chains, improve health outcomes, and reduce carbon emissions.”
Following the release of the order, the Sept. 15 acquisition of Nasdaq-listed F-Star by China Biopharma failed to get approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), and the acquisition of U.S.-based Snapdragon by Chinese company Calypso was terminated on Sept. 18, due to tightened regulation by U.S. authorities.
Two weeks later, China’s CXO concept stocks all experienced setbacks.
In fact, when the U.S. Department of Commerce placed two subsidiaries of China’s Wuxi Biologics on the unverified list (UVL) back in February this year, the Chinese bio-outsourcing industry was worried that it might become another industry targeted by the United States following U.S. sanctions on China’s chip industry.
The two companies on the UVL list are suspected of reselling export-controlled products or using them for military purposes.
Similar to the situation of China’s chip industry, Chinese biotech and pharmaceutical sectors are highly dependent on imported equipment and overseas business. In 2021, at least six CXO companies in China reported that markets abroad accounted for more than 70 percent of their total revenue. Most of these CXO companies also have overseas R&D or manufacturing facilities.
Zhao Xilong, a senior investment advisor at HSBC Investment Advisory, told Chinese state media that China’s biotech and pharmaceutical companies rely heavily on overseas markets, putting themselves in a “risky” situation.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
