Although Washington is paying more and more attention to “superpower competition” with China, its scope is expanding to include areas such as research and development, semiconductors, and manufacturing. So far, it has not seriously addressed one element: American land. For many years, Chinese companies have been buying valuable land at the expense of American landowners, farmers, and companies. This increased ownership is not only related to commercial transactions. It also undermines national security because it basically hands our food supply, distribution and processing to hostile opponents with little supervision. This also puts Americans seeking land at a disadvantage in their hometown. After all, as ordinary citizens, how could they hope to have the wealth of Beijing?
The problem is imminent.In less than ten years, China’s shares in U.S. farmland Exponential growth. Record from Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act It shows that China’s acquisitions have risen from “less than 10 times per year before 2008” to “12 to 25 times per year during 2008-13”. 2007, China purchase Six farms, all in California. In the second year, they bought 30 vehicles in Arizona, Texas, and Missouri outside of California.
This strategy, Outlined in an official food safety initiative of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2013, encouraging Chinese companies to better control agricultural supply chain imports. In addition, Beijing uses its various state-related financial institutions to financially support this priority.Agricultural Bank of China Already emphasized This fully meets the funding needs of agricultural cooperative enterprises to “go global”.
China’s largest agricultural investment in the United States occurred in 2013, when the World Bank facilitated the largest acquisition of a US company to date: $4.7 billion Buy Smithfield FoodsShuanghui Group is the world’s largest pork producer. The 146,000 acres of land Shuanghui acquired as a result make it one of the largest foreign owners of American property.
But Beijing did not stop there. At present, the agricultural state-owned company ChemChina is trying to acquire Swiss Syngenta, the world’s largest crop protection manufacturer and third largest seed supplier. people. Its value? 50 billion U.S. dollars. More importantly, although Syngenta is a Swiss company, It works It has multi-billion dollar farms in 16 states, invests in research and development every year, employs more than 4,000 Americans in 41 states, and considers the United States as its largest market. Therefore, its stake in American farmland is crucial, and China knows this.
These acquisitions and other smaller acquisitions underscore that China is slowly but surely gaining control of some American food supplies. These effects may be significant on several levels.
Michael Hansen/AFP via Getty Images
On the one hand, the companies that now own Smithfield and ChemChina have close ties with the CCP. As a result, when they receive orders to modify supplies, distribute exports in different ways, or speed up production at the expense of American companies or workers, They tend to forceFor example, when swine fever broke out in China last year, Smithfield changed the production of a factory to adapt to China’s shortages, knowing that the United States would also suffer from shortages.
On another level, foreign investment is increasing the value of real estate at the expense of potential American landowners.Ministry of Agriculture estimated Between 2004 and 2014, the value of land held by China increased from US$17.4 billion (in today’s US dollars) to US$42.7 billion.And, as the farm went bankrupt Set an eight-year high, Unrestricted foreign investors are robbing remaining farmland and in the process expelling local Americans seeking land. At the same time, local laws only provide some protection. Iowa The laws are strict and foreigners are not allowed to own land, while other countries, such as Maine, do not have such restrictive laws.
Legislators began to notice this. In 2017, Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduce The aptly named “Food Safety Law” is the “National Security Law”. If the law is passed, it will strengthen the protection of agricultural enterprises and keep them under domestic control.During the 2020 general election, the senator Elizabeth Warren (D-quality.) promise Make Iowa a federal law.Recently, an amendment on behalf of Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) prohibits China and its subsidiaries from directly purchasing agricultural land pass House Appropriations Committee. “The United States cannot rely on China for domestic agriculture and food supplies,” the congressman famous then.
Unfortunately, the Ministry of Agriculture Failed to evaluate correctly The impact of foreign ownership of agricultural land.Since 2011, only 10 fines have been insignificant 115,754 USD Has been evaluated by the United States Department of Agriculture. This is not because of lack of experimentation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture not only lacks the personnel and resources to monitor foreign ownership, but also relies heavily on companies to report correct declarations on their own. If the company does not do this, it will become burdensome to trace the correct finances.
A potential remedy is to include agriculture in the scope of work covered by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an intra-institution that examines the risks posed by foreign investment to U.S. national security, or legislators may decide on a different fix . Regardless of the specific circumstances, the congressional advocates are right: If American landowners are to remain competitive, Washington needs more resources to investigate the use of existing loopholes in foreign purchases of farmland. Once those loopholes are discovered, they need to be plugged.
Sam apodo (@sam_abodo) Is a researcher of the US Foreign Policy Committee interested in national security.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
