“No, China Is Not Buying Up All U.S. Farmland,” Cornell University Says

China’s critics in the U.S. suggest the country has been buying inordinate amounts of amounts of American farmland. “As president, I will do everything in my power to force China to sell every inch of land it owns,” former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley wrote in a commentary last year. A report by Cornell University this week, however, says Chinese ownership isn’t as large as some politicians make it out to be.

Countries classified by the federal government as an “adversary,” such as China, held only 1% of the roughly 40 million acres of foreign-owned farmland as of 2020, assistant professor Wendong Zhang and collaborators found. The survey was based on a federal dataset of more than 40,000 foreign investments in U.S. agricultural land.

Neighboring Canada topped the list of top foreign countries in terms of ownership of U.S. agricultural land. It held about a third, much of it forestland in Maine and Michigan — two states that border Canada, Cornell said in a report on Wednesday.

The U.S. at the federal level doesn’t ban foreign land ownership, Cornell noted. However, the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requires that foreign investors who acquire, transfer or hold an interest in U.S. agricultural land – including leases of 10 years or more – report those holdings and transactions to the secretary of agriculture, it said. Currently 24 states have restrictions on foreign ownership of land but each state’s vary, according to the report.

“I became interested in this, especially Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland, because of the political attention it was getting,” Zhang said. “And there’s an increase in state-level legislation, in Texas, Florida, Indiana and other places. We wanted to look at the facts, given the spread of rumors.”

“There is definitely grounds for more scrutiny and more concern” of foreign purchases of U.S. farmland, Zhang said. “The share of foreign-owned land has increased significantly over the last 20 years, but still the overall share is fairly low.” Zhang is a co-author of “Mapping and Contextualizing Foreign Ownership and Leasing of U.S. Farmland,” which appears in the 2024 Journal of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers, Cornell said.

Chinese investors notably include WH Group, controlled by billionaire Wan Long, which in 2013 bought Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor and hog producer. Smithfield in 2017 subsequently bought Clougherty Packing of California from Hormel Foods.

This year, Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao has drawn scrutiny after ranking No. 82 on a Land Report 100 list of America’s largest landowners, owing to a 198,000 acre purchase of forestland in Oregon in 2015. Chen’s Shanda Asset Management said in a statement in January it had “endeavored to strictly adhere to all legal requirements and procedural norms for the purchase. This included but was not limited to, the company proactively requesting a review of the potential acquisition by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). After a thorough examination, CFIUS concluded its review with no findings of national security concerns.”

“Shanda is the proud owner and steward of this land and over the last eight years, has continued timber operations and focused on ensuring forest health,” it added. Chen’s wife Chrissy Luo, Shanda Group co-founder, president and vice chairwoman, is a member of the California Academy of Sciences’ Board of Trustees and of the China Leadership Board at the 21st Century China Center at University of California San Diego.

Long-term leasing is the main driver of increasing foreign interests in U.S. farmland, and many foreign transactions are actually related to renewable-energy development, Cornell also noted.

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