(CNSNews.com) - Organizations with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are buying American farmland, some of it near U.S. military installations, a situation that's very concerning, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster told the House China committee at its hearing Tuesday night.
"I'm very concerned about that, about the purchase of lands and buildings next to sensitive sites," McMaster, a Trump appointee who later resigned, told the panel:
"It's extraordinary the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party has pursued a massive campaign of espionage. That's one facet of it. The other aspect I think we're getting at as well is the dependency on Chinese investment which then gives them really coercive power. I described in my written testimony the three Cs of co-option, coercion, and concealment.
"Co-opt -- by trying to build dependencies from U.S. agriculture on the Chinese market, and then, hey, once you're in, then to use that for coercive purposes.
"The commercial aspect of this is often tied to the United Front Work Department, an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which forms organizations that look innocuous that promote U.S.-China dialogue and economic discourse in the area of agriculture, in particular, in the American heartland.
“But those are organizations that are designed to advance the PRC's agenda. And then, you know -- co-opt, coercion, of course -- and then to conceal all of this as just normal business practice.
"So I think you're quite right to be concerned about this, Congressman Newhouse, and I think what you're doing what the committee's doing to pull the curtain back and shine the light on this behavior is the most important first step."
McMaster did not address the second part of the question Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) asked him, which was whether CFIUS (the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States) has the statutory authority to block land purchases by CCP-linked entities on national security grounds.
Another witness, former Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, did address CFUIS, however, telling the committee that CFIUS should apply "closer scrutiny" of such purchases:
"We've seen some purchases go through, even recently, that were in relatively close proximity to military bases," Pottinger said. "I'm not sure why CFIUS chose not to scrutinize that particular deal.
"CFIUS has had a trend of not exercising its ability to actually block. Instead, they frequently try to mitigate, but those mitigation measures are usually hollow, and don't actually protect our national security."
Rep. Newhouse is the lead sponsor of a bill introduced last month that would prohibit the purchase of public or private agricultural land in the United States by foreign nationals associated with the government of the People’s Republic of China.
According a January report from the Congressional Research Service -- based on USDA data -- foreign persons and entities held an interest in 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land in 2021, accounting for 3.1 percent of total privately owned land.
USDA reports that foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015.
Five countries accounted for approximately 62 percent of all foreign-owned U.S. agricultural land in 2021 -- Canada (31%, mostly forestland), the Netherlands (12%), Italy (7%), the United Kingdom (6%), and Germany (6%).
USDA reports that China accounted for 383,935 acres, or 0.9 percent of total foreign-owned U.S. agricultural land, as of year-end 2021.