Protecting farmland: America pressed to weed China out of U.S. agriculture acreage

 China’s government is systematically buying U.S. farmland as part of a strategy to meet soaring domestic demand and bolster an agricultural sector beset by decreasing arable land and polluted water.

The push, detailed in a congressional report, is raising security concerns and adding to tensions between Washington and Beijing on a host of economic and security fronts.

Wealthy Chinese private investors also have resumed real estate purchases in the United States, mainly in California and New York, to park money safely away from the control of the ruling Chinese Communist Party or to provide housing for family members attending U.S. universities, according to a real estate survey.

...The federal government has no legal restrictions on the amount of private U.S. agricultural land that can be foreign-owned.

Congress and several states are considering legislation to ban or restrict Chinese purchases and investment in the United States over concerns that the transactions are undermining U.S. security.

Legislation introduced in Texas, Florida, Arkansas and several other states also would prohibit Chinese citizens from buying real estate, based on national security concerns.

A total of 14 states prohibit or restrict foreign ownership of private agricultural land: Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin...more

Some more interesting things from the article:

A report by the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated that China’s decreasing arable land, large-scale water pollution and domestic livestock diseases are prompting the Chinese government to seek U.S. farmland, animal husbandry and agricultural intellectual property.

“The United States is a global leader in all of these fields, making it a prime trading partner and often a target of China’s efforts to strengthen its agriculture sector and food security, sometimes through illicit means,” the report said.

Chinese investment targets have included land, livestock, seeds and supporting infrastructure such as grain elevators and mills.

...A major purchase by China that the Obama administration approved in 2013 was Smithfield Foods Inc., the largest pork producer in the United States. The transaction accounts for much of the U.S. farmland now owned by Chinese interests.

The Chinese government supported the $4.7 billion purchase by Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd., a subsidiary of the Chinese company WH Group.

“Investing in a major foreign pork operation like Smithfield allows China to hedge against uncertainty in its domestic pork production,” the report said.

The commission report, citing Agricultural Department annual reports, said Chinese purchases “surged” from 13,720 acres in 2010 to 352,140 acres in 2020, mainly from the Smithfield deal. 

Many are concerned about the national security implications of this. To me, though, it demonstrates a communist country must turn to a capitalist country to feed its own people.

I was on to this issue way back when a student at  NMSU. You can read about that in my 2017 post  

Dean Holland, a doggin’ steer, and Russian hogs.