A proposed corn mill processing plant was expected to be a big economic boon for Grand Forks, North Dakota, bringing hundreds of jobs.
Then the U.S. Air Force weighed in at the request of North Dakota’s two U.S. senators — finding the Chinese-owned project’s proximity to a military base made it a “significant threat to national security.”
The city council voted the project down soon after.
U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-ND, said it was a clear decision to stop the project, given current U.S.–China relations.
“It’s quite coincidental that just within hours or days of the Air Force letter arriving, China had a spy balloon 55,000 feet above Montana,” Cramer said.
That spy balloon, the eventual rejection of the corn mill and a similar incident with a wind farm in Texas has put a spotlight on Chinese ownership of farmland. According to USDA data, foreign holdings of U.S. farmland increased by an average of 2.2 million acres a year from 2015 to 2021. The data also shows that China owns less than 1% of the foreign-owned land, while Canada, the largest investor, owns 31%. (Experts also caution there are issues with how that data is collected.)
Now federal lawmakers want to crack down and a flurry of bills has been introduced in state legislatures across the Midwest and the rest of the nation.
“I think (what happened in Grand Forks) was really an example to the rest of the country that, you know, be careful when it comes to dealing with investments from China,” Cramer said.
Federal action
Sen. Cramer is co-sponsoring two federal bills, the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) Act and Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act.
The former would blacklist China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from buying farmland, while both bills would place the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture onto the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, giving the USDA more input into potential land purchases.
Cramer said the legislation targets a big issue for both Republicans and Democrats.
“There’s such an overwhelming concern about China’s role in America and their intentions that we will get something passed in a strong bipartisan, bicameral way,” he said.
While the PASS Act and the FARM Act are the main bills to keep an eye on this year, other bills from the previous Congress might be reintroduced, according to Renee Johnson, an agriculture policy specialist at Congressional Research Service.
“There’s lots in the pipeline. It’s hard to keep up,” she said during a presentation at the USDA’s 2023 Agricultural Outlook Forum in February.
