U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is warning that foreign investors buying U.S. farmland pose a threat to local economies, food supplies and national security as she backs a bill to expand oversight of such purchases.
The Madison Dem and a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers yesterday announced the introduction of the AFIDA Improvements Act of 2024, building on the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978. It has a number of provisions that would overhaul aspects of the USDA’s process for tracking foreign investments.
In a statement on the bill, Baldwin said Wisconsin’s farmland is “the lifeblood of our rural communities” and must be protected for generations to come.
“Our bipartisan bill will help ensure Americans know exactly who is buying American agricultural land and the potential risks it poses,” she said.
Foreign investors owned 536,511 acres of agricultural land in Wisconsin as of December 2021, according to a USDA report. That represents 2.1% of the nearly 26 million acres of privately held agricultural land in the state.
Between December 2020 and December 2021, Wisconsin’s total for foreign-owned land rose by 34,460 acres.
The report also includes figures for total agricultural and non-ag land holdings by foreign investors, showing nearly 85,000 acres in Wisconsin are owned by those hailing from Canada. That figure is about 5,000 acres for the Netherlands, 3,000 acres for Italy, 16,000 for the United Kingdom, 12,000 for Germany and about 430,000 for all other countries of origin.
At the national level, foreign investors owned about 40.8 million acres of U.S. farmland in 2021, the report shows. Baldwin’s release notes foreign ownership of U.S. farmland had been rising by 0.8 million acres per year on average between 2009 and 2015, but that has jumped to 2.9 million acres per year since 2017.
Between 2010 and 2021, Chinese buyers upped their ownership of U.S. farmland from about 14,000 acres to more than 380,000 acres, the release shows.
Baldwin’s announcement says the bill was prompted by a recent Government Accountability Office report showing “alarming gaps” in the USDA’s foreign investments oversight.
Among other changes, the legislation would direct the USDA to modernize a handbook for officials to collect AFIDA data that was last updated in 2006, “better leverage” data to identify people who haven’t filed foreign investments as required under federal law, and require reporting on minority stake foreign ownership in ag land.
See more details in the release.
–By Alex Moe
