By Clint Thompson
The idea that an adversarial country owning land in Georgia is unacceptable to Tyler Harper, Georgia’s Agriculture Commissioner. He hopes to take steps next year in ensuring countries like China and Russia are unable to purchase land in the state.
“It’s important that we protect agricultural land in Georgia for producers in Georgia and those that are not adversarial to the U.S.,” Harper said during the Georgia Farm Bureau meeting on Dec. 4 in Jekyll Island, Georgia. “Those from foreign nations that want to buy farmland in the United States, we’re not opposed to that. Those that are a threat to the U.S. and want to utilize that against us as a threat to our nation’s national security, we’ve seen other states do this across the country. They’ve worked to address this issue to ensure that those foreign nations that are adversarial to the United States, they can’t utilize agriculture as a means to an end for them to be able to come after our nation, come after our state and come after our communities.
“I look forward to working with the General Assembly next session to get that across the finish line. I think it’s important for us to do that to protect Georgia agriculture from those that want to use it to come after our nation and come after our security as a state.”
Non-Friendly Countries
Foreign investors owned nearly 37.6 million acres of agricultural land in the U.S., according to data provided by Mykel Taylor, ALFA (Alabama Farmers Federation) Eminent Scholar with Auburn University, in 2022.
The focus, however, is on countries deemed not friendly to the U.S. like North Korea, China, Russia and Iran. Taylor’s statistics also showed that China owned 160,717 acres in Texas, 49,253 acres in North Carolina, 13,848 acres in Florida and 1,972 acres in Georgia. But that pales in comparison to Canada. It owned 3.8 million acres, more than doubling Italy, which is second with 1.6 million acres.
U.S. Senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) and Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Securing America’s Land from Foreign Interference Act in 2022 to prohibit members of the Chinese Communist Party from purchasing any land in the U.S.