Sets Stage for Foreign Monopoly on Our Own Food Production
Pop quiz, hotshot: Your biggest geopolitical adversary is buying up your country’s farmland. It’s buying up so much, in fact, that this feasibly could become a national security issue in a crisis or war. Do you stop it from buying more? That’s apparently a trick question for Democrats. After all, what if treating your enemy like your enemy “would perpetuate already rising anti-Asian hate”?
That’s what could end up dooming an effort to stop buyers with connections to the Chinese Communist Party from snapping up more of our farmland, according to Successful Farming. While the measure has bipartisan appeal, New York Democratic Rep. Grace Meng is objecting to it on the grounds it could stoke hatred.
Last month, the House Appropriations Committee approved language that would stop Chinese-linked individuals or concerns from purchasing more land and bar the land already purchased from farm subsidies as part of a $197 billion spending bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
“There are currently no federal safeguards against the creation of this monopoly,” he said.
Chinese investors controlled roughly 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S. at the beginning of 2020, worth $1.9 billion, according to Politico. That’s less than Canada and other European nations own and a fraction of a fraction of U.S. farmland.
However, China’s investments in foreign agriculture increased tenfold between 2009 and 2018, the USDA reported, and agricultural investment has been part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, purportedly to secure the country’s food chain. If the situation presented itself, of course, it could also be used to stoke insecurity in a geopolitical rival as well — particularly if that rival is America.
This has produced, for the most part, a rare moment of bipartisan comity.
The amendment was introduced by a Republican in Newhouse — a more liberal one, to be sure, but a Republican nonetheless — and yet it made it out of a Democrat-controlled committee.
As Politico noted, voices as diverse as former Vice President Mike Pence and Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren have called for tightened restrictions.
Enter Meng, first vice chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, who thinks the language might lead to more hate crimes.
“It would perpetuate already rising anti-Asian hate,” she warned at the bill’s markup, according to Successful Farming.
“Can we honestly say that this amendment, which singles out one country, won’t have repercussions on Asian-Americans across our country?” Meng said. “Let’s include all of our adversaries.”
Newhouse responded that the language was “about communist China,” adding, “This is not about calling attention in any negative way to any group of people in this country.”
That just touches the surface of how strikingly ignorant Meng’s comments were, though.
I despise the chinks, slanty eyed yellow commie bastards.
I don’t like that they are buying our land. Almost all Chinese economic entities are ultimately subject to their government, so it’s as if the CCP is buying that land.
However… they cannot take it home with them, and in any conflict with China, that land would be seized as enemy alien property. There are other restrictions as well, and of course localities are free to increase property taxes on such land to benefit their communities.
China should be BARRED from owning assets and businesses in America. After every horrible thing they have done and how clearly they are our enemy, why is china still being allowed to do this? Our political class is bought and paid for, they are traitors. China should be nuked into oblivion, instead our own government is facilitating china’s takeover of America.
A no brainer for sure. China is buying rare earth minerals all over the world also.All Cointries should worry about this.