Worried About Spying and Tensions With China, Midwest States Want to Limit Who Can Buy Farmland

Legislation is being proposed at the federal and state level to restrict foreign ownership of farmland, especially by China.The scrutiny comes after a Midwestern project was scuttled by military concerns and the flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the U.S. A proposed corn mill processing plant was expected to be a big economic boon for Grand Forks, North Dakota, bringing hundreds of jobs.

Then the U.S. Air Force weighed in at the request of North Dakota’s two U.S. senators — finding the Chinese-owned project’s proximity to a military base made it a "significant threat to national security."

The city council voted the project down soon after.

U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-ND, said it was a clear decision to stop the project, given current U.S.–China relations.

“It’s quite coincidental that just within hours or days of the Air Force letter arriving, China had a spy balloon 55,000 feet above Montana,” Cramer said.

That spy balloon, the eventual rejection of the corn mill and a similar incident with a wind farm in Texas has put a spotlight on Chinese ownership of farmland. According to USDA data, foreign holdings of U.S. farmland increased by an average of 2.2 million acres a year from 2015 to 2021. The data also shows that China owns less than 1% of the foreign-owned land, while Canada, the largest investor, owns 31%. (Experts also caution there are issues with how that data is collected.)

Now federal lawmakers want to crack down and a flurry of bills has been introduced in state legislatures across the Midwest and the rest of the nation.

“I think (what happened in Grand Forks) was really an example to the rest of the country that, you know, be careful when it comes to dealing with investments from China,” Cramer said.

Federal action Sen. Cramer is co-sponsoring two federal bills, the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) Act and Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act.

The former would blacklist China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from buying farmland, while both bills would place the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture onto the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, giving the USDA more input into potential land purchases.

Cramer said the legislation targets a big issue for both Republicans and Democrats.

“There's such an overwhelming concern about China's role in America and their intentions that we will get something passed in a strong bipartisan, bicameral way,” he said.

The Amount of Foreign-Owned Agricultural Land Compared to Privately-Owned Agricultural Land This chart shows the amount of foreign held agricultural land compared to the amount of privately held land in each state as of 2021. Privately held agricultural land (acres)Foreign held agricultural land (acres) Oklahoma 1,670,511 38,326,752 Kansas 1,183,033 49,188,971 Illinois 853,813 30,536,400 Nebraska 791,176 45,610,153 Iowa 507,519 33,340,369 Indiana 433,588 19,752,052 Missouri 433,213 North Dakota 38,548,498

While the PASS Act and the FARM Act are the main bills to keep an eye on this year, other bills from the previous Congress might be reintroduced, according to Renee Johnson, an agriculture policy specialist at Congressional Research Service.

“There’s lots in the pipeline. It’s hard to keep up,” she said during a presentation at the USDA’s 2023 Agricultural Outlook Forum in February.

In January, lawmakers created a Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party that focuses on economic and security threats from China.

The House Agriculture Committee also turned its attention to getting more accurate data on how much U.S. land is foreign-owned. The committee requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office do a study of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, also known as AFIDA, the law that requires foreign investors to report to the USDA and provides the data on foreign ownership.

“The data is incomplete,” Johnson said. “There’s limited ownership, transparency. A lot of the investors. They’re known identity havens, so we don’t really know what the true nationality is.”

State action There are 14 states, many of them in the Midwest, that already have laws on the books preventing or restricting such purchases. Still, more restrictions are making their way through state legislatures in more than half the states in the nation.

“There's so many proposals. It's insane,” said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, who has been keeping track of the laws and bills in each state.

Two Iowa House bills would ban Chinese ownership of property in the state. In Kansas, a Senate bill would prevent all foreign ownership of land, while another Senate bill and House bill would target “foreign adversaries.” Illinois has three similar bills in the House.

Brown said that foreign land ownership has come up time and time again since colonization. He’s pinpointed four waves of “political flashpoints” throughout U.S. history. Currently, he said, we’re seeing a fifth wave.

“Especially in 2023 with all these proposals, proponents of these bills, lawmakers that are proposing these bills are really saying the reason is national security,” said Brown.



Source: kcur.org