Members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party are proposing to expand the jurisdiction of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. over land purchases and require the panel to take food security into account in its reviews.
The lawmakers' bipartisan Protecting U.S. Farmland and Sensitive Sites from Foreign Adversaries Act would required CFIUS to consider the impact “a covered transaction would have on United States food security, including through foreign adversary acquisition of biotechnology related to agriculture.”
The bill's sponsors include the committee's chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik of New York. It also includes committee members Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., Dan Newhouse, R-Wash. and Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa.
The bill would apply to the governments of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Russian Federation. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela also would be covered, but only under Nicholás Maduro's presidency.
Purchases by residents of these countries would trigger CFIUS reviews. They, along with foreign governments, would be required to make mandatory CFIUS filings if purchasing land near sensitive sites.
CFIUS is an interagency body tasked with screening foreign investments in U.S. companies or property for potential threats to national security. CFIUS then makes recommendations to the president, who ultimately decides whether the transaction should be cleared or blocked.
The push to give CFIUS more authority over land purchases comes after a China-based agribusiness company called the FuFeng Group purchased 370 acres of North Dakota land for a wet corn milling plant. The U.S. Air Force said the land presented a “significant threat to national security” due to its location 12 miles from one of the agency's bases, but CFIUS said in December that it did not have the jurisdiction to review the purchase.
In addition to adding food security as a factor CFIUS would need to consider when conducting reviews, the bill would also require the secretary of agriculture to vote on transactions involving farmland or agriculture technology, though it wouldn't make the ag secretary a permanent member of the committee, which other lawmakers have proposed doing.
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The bill also creates a “presumption of non-resolvability,” which would require CFIUS to review transactions near military sites with the “presumption that the national security concerns cannot be resolved,” according to a press release.
CFIUS's list of “sensitive national security sites” currently only include some military facilities and national laboratories, according to the release. The bill would expand that list to include all of these facilities, along with defense-funded university-affiliated research centers, critical telecommunication nodes, intelligence sites and other “sensitive sites.”
Other sponsors of the bill include Reps. John Garamendi, D-Calif., Ed Case, D-Hawaii, Jim Costa, D-Calif., Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., Frank Lucas, R-Okla., Jason Crow, D-Colo., Rob Wittman, R-Va., Salud Carbajal, D-Calif., Jim Banks, R-Ind., Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, and Mary Peltola, D-Alaska.
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