Tennessee’s Republican state legislators want to loosen foreign influence- a new bill being considered would limit foreign ownership of agricultural land. The bill wouldn’t limit foreign ownership of land for any other purposes. It also wouldn’t apply retroactively.
State Senator Frank Niceley (R-Strawberry Plains) first introduced the bill, followed by State Representative Jerry Sexton (R-Bean Station).
Discussion from the Senate Energy, Agriculture, and National Resources Committee hearing clarified that this bill sought to protect farmers – and that they aren’t in opposition to it, either.
“Like I said, it’s been tested for 42 years in Iowa, and it’s working out there,” stated Niceley. “There’s a lot of concern about, you know, people buying America.”
According to estimations on this bill’s fiscal impact, the cost to the state would amount to over $132,600 per year.
Due to the increasing presence of foreign influence in the country, the USDA created the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) which requires that foreign companies disclose holdings and transaction information.
In 2019, the AFIDA report estimated that foreign investors owned over 35.2 million acres of American farmland. That’s 2.7 percent of all privately-held agricultural land and 1.5 percent of all land in the country.
That’s roughly more acres than about 25 states have, respectively. An overwhelming majority of the foreign investors flocked to the outermost parts of the eastern and western areas of the country.
China is one country with a large, controlling interest in America. In recent years, China has increased their agricultural investments by tenfold, the USDA noted.
Another state currently considering similar legislation is Missouri, following concerns over anti-competitive market conditions due to foreign control.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill on Thursday. The House will consider it during a subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
I am all in favor of this. They might want to add Bill Gates to the prohibited list because he is buying up thousands and thousands of land and he is very much a globalist.
This should have been done long ago. The Globalist agenda under Bus especially was to sell our Infrastructure landl and and Businesses to Foreign/Global Owners and lower Americans to the third world status, of the global level playing field.
American are becoming Renters and our money, our economy is not going into our pockets but to Aliens toe the Global Ruling Economic Elites and their corporations. They are bleeding America dry by Politicians representing them and not America! No other Country does this!
The corn and soy fields of Indiana were bought by Saudis in the sixties and seventies and hills and hollows and apple an peach orchards leveled into huge fields and streams into muddy fertilizer and pesticide filled ditches. The only money in the area is to Illegal Aliens and American Supervisors and motels and shops and slumlords.
Tennessee is being bought up by Foreign Interests at an alarming rate..When The Politicians said invest i America, buy up America with cheap dollars in comparison to the Euro..