U.S. Senators Mike Braun, Todd Young, and others introduced a bill to collect more data on foreign land ownership of agricultural land in the U.S.
The bill, known as the AFIDA Improvements Act of 2024, comes after a report was released last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). In it, the GAO found the USDA process for complying with the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) of 1978 is not equipped to properly safeguard American land from ownership by foreign adversaries.
The bill would require the USDA enter a memorandum of understanding with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to govern data sharing between the two agencies. Among other things, it would also require the USDA to modernize the AFIDA handbook and collect data from every foreign person with a minority stake in an agricultural land asset.
According to USDA data from December of 2021, foreign investors own approximately 40.8 million acres of U.S. farmland. Foreign ownership increased modestly from 2009 to 2015 at an average of 0.8 million acres per year, but in 2017 that number jumped to an average of 2.9 million acres per year. China specifically increased their land ownership from 13,720 acres to 383,935 acres from 2010 to 2021.
The bill is supported by the Agribusiness Council of Indiana, the Indiana Corn Growers Association, and the Indiana Soybean Alliance.
Read more: The history and effectiveness of foreign land ownership laws in Indiana
