Experts Warn USDA May Lack Staff to Enforce New Farmland Security Measures

The Agriculture Department’s new farm security plan should help strengthen federal efforts to track foreign influence over U.S. agriculture, but it could be hampered by a lack of personnel, policy experts tell Agri-Pulse.

“It does set a marker to put [federal] agencies on record to make sure they prioritize programs that address real national security issues like bioterrorism” and other nations’ efforts “to do things to harm our agricultural industries here domestically,” said Nova Daly, a senior public adviser at Wiley, a major law firm in Washington. “Make no mistake about it, China is looking for vulnerabilities in the U.S., including in the ag sector.”

“It’s framed in a way that’s not a traditional document to see for policy purposes,” Daly said, but “it puts them on the hook for a number of things,” he added. 

He noted a July 8 memorandum with the Treasury Department that outlines implementation of language in the fiscal 2024 appropriations bill requiring USDA to take part in proceedings of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States on a case-by-case basis.

Daly’s an expert on CFIUS who has held senior leadership posts at the departments of the Treasury and Commerce, in the White House, and in the Senate. He testified before Congress on the issue last year.

But he and Kevin Shea, former administrator of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, both said it will take staff to implement security measures. 

“If you’re saying, we’re going to bolster all these things and do these lines of communication and early warning and address these big issues, you need to dedicate people to do them,” Daly said.

USDA shed about 15,000 employees through recently enacted voluntary buyouts, including more than 1,300 at APHIS. Shea said cuts at APHIS could make it challenging to address food safety and disease concerns at ports of entry.

The 12-page plan was released last week at an event at the Agriculture Department that featured Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a group of congressional lawmakers.

Addressing a longstanding issue with tracking of foreign land purchases, the plan says USDA “will aggressively implement reforms” to the process known as AFIDA — the 1978 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, which requires the department to produce reports annually on the amount of acreage held by foreign entities.

Under AFIDA, foreign investors must file documentation with USDA detailing land acquisitions and dispositions. Failing to file a timely report incurs a late fee worth 0.1% of the land’s value for each week purchases go unreported, with the penalty capped at 25% of the land’s value. Not every foreign entity that holds land files reports on time, however, and the USDA in recent years has struggled with the task of penalizing those that don’t.

Talking points prepared for former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack in 2023, obtained by Agri-Pulse through a Freedom of Information Act request, say “poor record keeping” at the agency “resulted in inconsistent reports that could not be used as the basis to assess penalties” between 2016 and 2020.

The document said “very limited staffing” also posed a challenge from 2015 to 2018.

The Trump administration plan addresses not just farmland, but also cybersecurity and supply chains, pointing out that “the food and agriculture sector entails vast open space and distances, interconnected ‘just in time’ networks, transboundary movement of products, and dependence on new technology that creates a tempting, target-rich environment for malicious actors.”

It also reaches back in history to note that “intelligence gathered by American forces in Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks [in 2001] uncovered documents involving U.S. agriculture along with al-Qaeda training manuals specifically targeting agriculture.”

Shea said that “as a general rule, I support more attention on food security being treated as national security” but added that much of what’s in the plan is not “particularly new.”

“I know that USDA has always tried to make the point that food security is national security. I think that’s something that USDA is always focused on, and a little bit of credit here: If they can get other parts of the government to take it more seriously, that’s a good thing.”

Shea pointed to the $1.25 billion National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas as an example of USDA’s emphasis on protecting U.S. agriculture. “Researchers at NBAF will work to deliver scientific information and countermeasures to protect U.S. agriculture and combat threats to public health from foreign animal diseases that exist in animals but can infect humans,” the NBAF website says.

David Ortega, an economist at Michigan State who also testified to Congress last year on the issue, told Agri-Pulse, “We do need to invest more on tracking foreign investments in the United States,” but he said USDA needs enough resources to do so. He noted that “until very recently, [tracking] was done via a paper and pencil system.”

But Ortega also said readers of the plan might be confused by the map it uses to show the location of parcels owned by Chinese entities.

“That map looks a bit misleading, because it only represents the counties,” even though the actual parcels owned by entities connected to China are a small part of those areas.

In addition, “The number that they use is 265,000 acres, which is really minuscule in the grand scheme of things,” he said. “I think that’s another thing that I think is worth putting into context, that the land that is owned by Chinese entities is less than 1% of all foreign-owned land. So we’re talking about, like, fractions of a percent of private agricultural land.”

Entities connected to China, including Smithfield, own about 0.5% of foreign-owned farmland in the U.S., or 0.0003% of total U.S. farmland.

Ortega said China itself does not own any land and that the small amount of land owned by foreign entities, and China-connected entities in particular, “doesn’t threaten our ability to produce food, because we produce more than enough food in the U.S. to feed not only ourselves, but a big portion of the world as well.”

At the press conference announcing the plan, Rollins said the federal government is looking at ways to “claw back” land held by Chinese-connected entities, but she provided no details of how that might be done. Her plan calls for USDA to “work alongside state and congressional partners where applicable to take swift legislative or executive action to end the direct or indirect purchase or control of American farmland by nationals from countries of concern or other foreign adversaries.”

Numerous states have enacted or are considering legislation to bar companies with ties to China, North Korea and other countries. In a recent paper, Ortega and a co-author found that “states with more Chinese-held ag land are more likely to pass bills, but states that export more ag goods to China are less likely to do so.” 

One such law, in Florida, has been blocked by a federal appeals court. The USDA’s plan says that in light of that decision, “and likely continued challenges to state-to-state laws involving land ownership restrictions, Congress should consider whether broader federal law is warranted. In either case, U.S. laws and policies designed to address national security matters arising out of Chinese ownership and control of U.S. agricultural assets and supply chains is incomplete and exposes our military and critical infrastructure to vulnerabilities.”

Ortega, however, said restrictive laws “could lead to unintended consequences. We might be restricting investments that might benefit local communities.”

In addition, other countries could retaliate. “China has been the focus, but there are other countries that could potentially withhold or prevent Americans from investing in their economies, and so it could be a very slippery slope,” he said.

This article was originally published by Agri-Pulse. Agri-Pulse is a trusted source in Washington, D.C., with the largest editorial team focused on food and farm policy coverage.