The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would seek to limit Chinese and foreign purchases of American farmland, citing a threat to national security.
In a seven-point national security plan, the Agriculture Department said it would enhance public disclosures of foreign ownership of farmland, enact steeper penalties for false filings and work with Congress and states to ban purchases from foreign adversaries.
American agriculture is “under threat from criminals, from political adversaries and from hostile regimes that understand our way of life as a profound and existential threat to themselves,” the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, said in a news conference on Tuesday.
The move underscores the increasing concern in recent years over foreign, particularly Chinese, ownership of American farmland. In 2023, the Senate voted 91 to 7 to block businesses based in China from purchasing American farmland, after a Chinese company’s attempted purchase of cropland for a corn mill near a military base in North Dakota. And in 2024, the Biden administration proposed a rule to make it significantly harder for foreign businesses to buy land near locations deemed important to national security.
Twenty-six states currently prohibit or limit non-Americans from purchasing or investing in agricultural land within their boundaries. While there is no federal law barring the practice, a 1978 law requires foreign owners to report their holdings — though the disclosure requirements have been criticized as lax and the government’s data collection as slow and error-prone.
In 2023, the year with the most recent data available, foreigners owned nearly 45 million acres of cropland and forests. That equated to about 3.5 percent of all agricultural land in the country, but represented a more than 70 percent increase from a decade earlier. Canadians owned the largest amount — 15.3 million acres, or about a third — while China held more than 270,000 acres.
Ms. Rollins said in the news conference that the Trump administration was also exploring ways to “claw back” existing foreign purchases of farmland.
Other elements of the Agriculture Department’s plan include identifying and refocusing domestic production of critical farming inputs like fertilizers; cracking down on fraud in nutrition assistance programs like food stamps; enhancing security in agricultural research; re-evaluating department programs that support foreign nations; defending against animal and plant diseases; and helping private food and agriculture companies protect their operations from cyberattacks.
Ms. Rollins was joined by more than a dozen Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers.
Linda Qiu is a reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
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