“Chinese criminal organizations and Mexican cartels immediately moved in to be able to set up shop in distribution nationwide,” he said Tuesday on the Senate floor.
U.S. Sen. James Lankford on Tuesday renewed alarms over foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land, noting that such interests expanded their Oklahoma holdings from 321,000 acres in 2011 to nearly 1.7 million a decade later.
“When I travel around my state I hear people talking about the border, I hear people talk about the economy, and I often will hear people say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of foreign ownership going into land right now in Oklahoma.’ And it’s dramatically affecting the price of real estate, the price of agricultural land, but also what’s happening on that land,” Lankford said on the Senate floor.
Law enforcement officials say the combination of legalized medical marijuana and COVID-19 attracted a great deal of money to the state in 2020 and 2021, much of it invested in illegal cannabis-growing operations. Anecdotally, Oklahomans reported strangers buying farmland, often with cash.
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Federal law requires reporting of foreign ownership, but those who have investigated the matter found compliance spotty and ownership sometimes difficult to determine.
Lankford’s Tuesday remarks were mostly aimed at what he called the “economic peril” of Chinese ownership, although the U.S. Department of Agriculture report he cited does not list Chinese nationals as among the largest foreign landholders.
According to that USDA report, Canadian interests accounted for about half of Oklahoma’s foreign ownerships, with 837,524 acres. Italian owners held 525,000 acres. Combined, they account for 81% of the state’s foreign-owned land.
Earlier this month, Forbes reported China ranks 18th of the 109 countries that own U.S. agricultural land. Last week, the right-center American Action Forum said China is 10th in terms of land value and that most of the nearly 400,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land owned by Chinese interests were the result of Shuanghui International’s acquisition of Smithfield, the world’s largest pig and pork producer, and the purchase of more than 140,000 acres in West Texas for a wind farm.
Texas regulators blocked the latter enterprise, and in 2022 the land was sold to Spanish interests, the American Action Forum report says.
“There’s a rapid transition that’s happening where foreign entities are rapidly buying up land, and I would tell you if you’re a farmer and rancher, they would say there are some things that God’s just not making more of, and one of them is land. You can’t just give that up,” Lankford said.
“This is a problem, and it’s a problem nationally.”
Lankford proposes several reforms, among them subjecting foreign agricultural land sales to the same process as the sale of some other assets. This process includes scrutiny by the Departments of Defense, Commerce and Treasury and intelligence agencies.
According to the USDA, foreign land ownership increased from about 2% of the nation’s agricultural land, including forests, to 3.1% from 2011 to 2021.
In Oklahoma, it went from about 1% to 4.4%. The largest tracts are in western Oklahoma, including Cimarron County (229,383 acres), Texas County (194,912), Custer County (194,121), Woods County (169,929) and Washita County (114,529).
According to the report, Tulsa County foreign land ownership consisted of one 66-acre tract.
