A U.S. senator said Wednesday that the federal government should seize all farmland in the United States owned by the Chinese Communist Party and its associates — a growing issue of concern in Texas.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) made the statement during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on foreign ownership of American land.
“I hope many of our colleagues agree, the Chinese government and other U.S. adversaries should own zero, zero agricultural land in our country, I believe that,” Fetterman said, according to Fox News. “They’re taking back our pandas! We should take back all of their farmland.”
Fetterman’s remark was a reference to the expiration of the panda bear loan agreement between the China Wildlife Conservation Association and U.S. zoos.
The three pandas at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., will be returned to China in December. Two pandas have been on loan at the zoo since 2000. A third was born there.
The pandas at the Memphis Zoo were returned in April, and the ones at the San Diego Zoo were sent back to China in 2019. A pair of the iconic black-and-white bears at Atlanta Zoo will be returned in 2024.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has grown its investments in foreign agriculture, forestry, and fisheries from $300 million in 2009 to $3.3 billion in 2016, according to the Department of Agriculture. This includes 383,935 acres of U.S. land purchased by Chinese firms.
The debate over CCP influence in U.S. agriculture made its way to Texas in recent months, as reported by The Dallas Express.
David Frankens of Lufkin, a Texas real estate mogul, allegedly bought 130,000 acres of land and then sold it to a former captain in the Chinese military, flipping it at twice the market value, locals told the Daily Mail. This included a 15,000-acre ranch where the Chinese businessman proposed the installation of a 46-turbine wind farm, raising concerns that the CCP-tied billionaire would have access to the electrical grid.
“How dare you bring this man into our neighborhood of really solid landowners who care about the land and where some families have spent six generations out here,” James King, a local realtor and ranch owner, told the Daily Mail.
The Chinese official, Sun Guangxin, bought the land in Val Verde County for an estimated $110 million between 2016 and 2018. Sun began to sell the land after facing pressure from locals.
​​”You could call it the deals of the century,” King told the Daily Mail. “I would go ‘wow,’ he got that deal done, and then it was just one after another after another.”
