If America cannot pay its debts with dollars, it will have to pay them in assets.
Across the United States, farmland is being gobbled up by foreign businesses. The most recent report on foreign land ownership by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that foreigners owned 35.2 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of Dec. 31, 2019. This is 2.7 percent of all privately held agricultural land and 1.5 percent of all land in the United States. That’s a 60 percent increase from a decade earlier when foreigners owned about 22.2 million acres.
British, Canadian, Dutch, Italian and German investors own the largest amount of U.S. farmland, but authoritarian regimes like China are also buying up land in America. The Chinese own about 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S., worth about $1.9 billion. And China would like to buy more. An official Chinese Communist Party food security initiative, published in 2013, encourages Chinese companies to gain greater control over agricultural supply chain imports by buying farmland in foreign countries. That is why China has already purchased Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork producer, and is attempting to purchase Syngenta, the world’s third-biggest seed supplier.
Read more at “China Is Buying Up America’s Farms”