Companies from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran would be barred from purchasing U.S. agricultural land under language approved by the House Appropriations Committee. “More needs to be done to ensure the U.S. food supply chain is secure and independent,” said Representative Dan Newhouse, lamenting that there are no federal safeguards against land purchases by authoritarian regimes.
By voice vote, members of the House Appropriations Committee added Newhouse’s provision to the annual USDA-FDA funding bill. The committee later cleared the $195.6 billion bill for floor debate on a party-line, 31-26 vote, with Republicans, including Newhouse, dissenting. Fiscal 2023 funding would be nearly $39 billion below this year’s funding, because of the expiration of pandemic relief programs.
It was the second year in a row that appropriators agreed with Newhouse’s warnings about foreign investment in U.S. farmland. Last year, the Appropriations Committee voted to ban China from acquiring additional U.S. farmland. The proposal was eventually revised to a request for a USDA report on the matter.
“We’ve agreed to include additional adversaries to the base amendment this year given the horrific events in Ukraine at the hands of Russia and the Putin regime,” said Newhouse during the three-hour committee markup of the USDA-FDA bill. “As many members of this committee know, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are not our allies.”
Foreign investors owned 37.6 million acres, or 2.9%, of U.S. forest and farmland at the end of 2020, according to a USDA report. Holdings have increased by an average of nearly 2.2 million acres a year since 2015. Forests accounted for 46% of agricultural land held by foreigners. Some 29% was cropland, and pastures and other ag land accounted for 23%. China was the most active of the investors, according to Newhouse, a Republican from Washington State. Alabama Representative Robert Aderholt, also a Republican, said, “We’ve seen a surge in Chinese ownership with Alabama farmers being pushed aside when land was offered for sale.”
Editor’s Take:
Efforts to monitor and suppress foreign ownership of U.S. farmland have taken various forms over the past 40 years. This latest proposal would be an outright ban. Given the geopolitical instability today, this could be a reasonable approach. Competing with a large, powerful and well-funded purchaser, such as China, would drive the price of farmland up creating an unfair competition to local farmers attempting to purchase that same piece of property. More serious than that concern is the impact it could eventually have on food security in our own country. As I have said many times in the AIR Weekly Report, agriculture IS a national security interest, and we need to treat it as such. Given that we have allowed foreign nations to have too much control over certain strategic industries, as evidenced during the COVID pandemic, this legislation would serve us well against those who pose a risk to our nation!
