China's communists don't have food, so now they want to control ours

Home to 20 percent of the global population, but only 7 to 9 percent of the world’s arable land, China is an extreme food shortage. To combat the crisis, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) devised a decades-long strategy of purchasing millions of acres of American farmland, livestock, seeds and food supply lines from the United States.

In fact, in ten years, Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland has jumped from $81M in 2010 to $1.8B in 2020. It doesn’t take a top-secret security clearance to imagine the dangerous economic and national security implications of China maintaining undue leverage over U.S. food supply. Although food security isn’t always at the top of defense and national security conversations, it should be.

In the coming days, members of Congress will reintroduce the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) Act. The legislation bans China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from investing in or acquiring any land or business involved in American agriculture. It also adds the Secretary of Agriculture as a standing member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) – which reviews transactions involving foreign investment in the U.S.