Congress should act on bill to protect US farms from foreign interference

Last week, Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) introduced the Protecting America’s Agricultural Land from Foreign Harm Act of 2023, marking an important step in keeping U.S. farmland safe from malign foreign influence by reforming how the United states tracks foreign investment in agriculture. 

The law would reform the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA), which  requires the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to collect data on foreign ownership of agricultural land in the U.S. The law was passed in 1978, but for decades, USDA has been lax in enforcing the law and properly tracking foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land. This laxity has resulted in dangerous Chinese purchases. 

The calls to reform AFIDA come amid mounting concern about foreign investment in American agriculture, due to cases of Chinese Communist Party-connected entities buying property next to American military bases. For example, Fufeng Group, a Chinese agriculture company attempted to buy property in Grand Forks, North Dakota, next to Grand Forks Air force Base in 2021. In another case, a CCP-connected billionaire bought hundreds of thousands of acres on the Texan-Mexican border near Val Verde Air Force base in Texas in 2016 and 2017. 

The bill would prohibit the purchase of agricultural land in the U.S. by anyone directly associated with adversarial foreign governments, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. As Braun explained, “We cannot allow our top foreign adversaries to buy up American farmland and compromise our agricultural supply chains.” 

The bill would strengthen USDA’s ability to fine foreign investors who do not correctly file their investments with USDA. Other members of Congress have recently taken notice of improper reporting and management at USDA; last month, a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to USDA asking why the agency had failed to assess penalties for failure to report foreign investment in agriculture.  

Other reforms include raising the maximum fine from 25 percent of the property's value to 30 percent, as well as allowing USDA to impose a lien on the fined property—the goal being to motivate investors to pay their fines promptly.

The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review how USDA’s staff enforced AFIDA and if staffing and other administrative issues limited AFIDA's effectiveness. From 2000 to 2022, USDA only had two or three employees working on AFIDA, so it is hardly surprising that problems arose. An investigation from the GAO is a smart way to determine whether this limited resourcing made it harder for the U.S. to track foreign investment in agriculture. 

Finally, the bill improves AFIDA’s data transparency by requiring USDA to make the AFIDA database public. At the moment, anyone interested in the data must make a Freedom of Information Act request to access the raw data behind USDA’s annual reports on foreign investment in the United States. By making the data publicly available, the legislation would make it easier for Congress and the public to understand where foreign investment in American agriculture is happening. 

Unlike other bipartisan bills introduced on AFIDA reform in the past, such as the Food Security is National Security Act and Farmland Security Act, the Protecting America’s Agricultural Land from Foreign Harm Act of 2023 aims both to determine why AFIDA has its longstanding enforcement problems, and to solve those problems going forward.

There is a strong chance that this bill will enter law, for two reasons. First, the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 has a section requiring the secretary of USDA to report to Congress about the impact foreign investment in agriculture has on American farmers. There is also a section on modernizing AFIDA to finally allow investors to report their holdings online instead of through paper forms. 

Second, with the farm bill being up for reauthorization this year, it would be easy for the senators to submit the Protecting America’s Agricultural Land from Foreign Harm Act as an amendment to the farm bill, a set of legislation passed every five years on agricultural and food programs. It will take effort, but given the congressional interest in reforming AFIDA and the nature of the farm bill, now is an excellent time to address this important issue and protect our land from dangerous foreign investment.

Lars Erik Schönander is Policy Technologist at Lincoln Network.