Lawmakers Looking to Curb Chinese Ownership of U.S. Farmland

But Gale told VOA Mandarin that most Chinese land purchases are concentrated in nations where it is easy and cheap to acquire farmland or other resources such as timber or grazing land, while acquiring land in the United States is often expensive and complicated.

“So most Chinese investment is concentrated in countries other than the United States,” he said in a telephone interview. “For example, there’re Chinese farmers growing soybeans and vegetables in Russia, there’re Chinese investors who own palm oil plantations in Indonesia and have forestry resources or logging operations in Southeast Asian countries such as Laos and Cambodia.”

Anxiety Rising
Nevertheless, anxiety about Chinese land ownership is gaining traction at a time when the White House and Congress are seeking to curb economic dependence on China, especially in critical sectors. And farmland producing crops consumed by people and animals is necessary for national security as well as national identity.

The effort to curb China’s acquisition of America’s farmland has received support from both chambers of Congress. Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley told VOA Mandarin that food production is a national security issue.

“I think that the production of food in the United States is very important for national security,” he said in a hallway interview with VOA Mandarin on Capitol Hill. “Like Napoleon said, an army marches on its belly. So consequently, we have to make sure that not a significant amount of our farmland is controlled by foreign interests.”

Republican Oklahoma Senator James Lankford agrees. He expressed concern about the relationship between Beijing and the Chinese companies that acquire America’s farmland. Other foreign entities holding American farmland are not as tightly bound to their governments as Chinese companies are to Beijing.

“We know the relationships are very different there,” he told VOA Mandarin in a hallway interview on Capitol Hill. “The acquisition could be backed up by a communist government and the dollars coming from the communist government. That’s a very different dynamic … and trying to be able to manage and control land, that’s a serious issue.”

Increasing Land Prices
Joe Maxwell, president of the advocacy group Family Farm Action, said he worries that foreign purchases will increase the price of the land and force the next generation of American farmers out of business.

“It’s a bad thing to allow them to own U.S. farmland … they are willing to artificially raise the price of that land above its production value. It denies young farmers, new farmers, farmers of color who have trouble accessing capital, to buy land,” he said in a phone interview.

Yinan Wang Reporter at Voice of America. Yi-Hua Lee, a staff reporter for Voice of America Mandarin Service, contributed to this report.This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).