‘We’re going to protect it by saying, ‘You can’t come. You can’t do it. We don’t want you buying our land’,' the former president told NTD during a roundtable.
During a roundtable on the threat posed by communist China to American farmland, former President Donald Trump said that protecting the land was straightforward.
“We’re going to protect it by saying, ‘You can’t come. You can’t do it. We don’t want you buying our land. We don’t want you taking the land and basically taking it off the market,’” Trump said, when asked how he would shield critical infrastructure in the United States and Pennsylvania from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence.
Companies with primary investors in China own 349,442 acres of U.S. farmland as of the last day of 2022,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The majority of this land is concentrated in five states, with Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri having the largest shares.
“The acreage associated with China—or any other country discussed in this report—should be interpreted as a minimum,” the report states, noting it did not include China-linked companies in which the predominance of the CCP’s influence was not clear.
Trump and many government officials worry the CCP could exploit the U.S. holdings of China-based companies.
Even though China-based companies own just shy of
1 percent of all foreign-held agricultural land in the United States, with Canadian companies owning the most at around one third, the CCP considers the United States a
sworn enemy due to its values of liberty, free speech, and multi-party governance that are antithetical to the party’s communist domination.
National security concerns scuttled plans to sell land near Grand Forks Air Force Base to the Fufeng Group, a China-based firm.
In a January 2023
letter, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) voiced serious concern to the U.S. Air Force over the proposal, which would have established a China-owned corn mill within 15 miles of an Air Force installation that
hosts the 319th Reconnaissance Wing.
It’s one of two Air Force units that
operate the RQ-4 Global Hawk, a drone aircraft that provides intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance on a global scale.
“The department’s view is unambiguous: the proposed project presents a significant threat to national security with both near- and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area,” the letter reads.
Trump told NTD that preventing China-based entities from acquiring U.S. farmland could be done “very easily.” NTD, or New Tang Dynasty, is
a sister company of The Epoch Times.
The Republican presidential nominee was flanked by former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and former Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin.
They
lead the Protecting America Initiative, the organization that hosted Trump. According to the organization’s website, its “mission is to stop the threat of Communist China at the state level.”
Both Grenell and Zeldin could have roles in a future Trump administration.
“He’s a big part of our campaign, and I want to bring him to Washington with us,” the former president
said of Zeldin during a September rally in Uniondale, New York.
Grenell has been talked up in the media as a possible Secretary of State.
“If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state,” Grenell said during an appearance earlier this year on the Self Centered
podcast.
Trump’s visit to rural Pennsylvania to talk about China and U.S. farmland came ahead of a campaign rally the same day in nearby Indiana, Pennsylvania.
