Our nation will not truly be secure until our farmland, food supply chain, and valuable research products are protected from malign foreign influences.

F arm security is national security. Our foreign adversaries, primarily the People’s Republic of China (PRC), own large swaths of agricultural land across our country. Every acre of this land could potentially be used as a platform for surveillance or sabotage. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a regime that has openly promised to overtake us as the world’s superpower by all means at its disposal, has already used agricultural espionage to further its malign goals.

A “fungus arrest” in June 2025 may have prevented a food supply disaster, with two Chinese-national researchers at the University of Michigan allegedly smuggling samples of a toxic fungus considered a potential agroterrorism weapon into the U.S. The pathogen is responsible for head blight, a disease devastating to wheat, rice, and barley that could have destroyed nearly 150 million acres of crops. In 2022 a Chinese citizen pleaded guilty to economic espionage for stealing intellectual property relating to data analytics for maximizing farm yields, in what the Department of Justice called a “danger to the U.S. economy” that jeopardized “our nation’s leadership in innovation and our national security.” A few years earlier, another Chinese national was imprisoned and ordered to forfeit farms he had purchased in Iowa and Illinois for his role in a long-term conspiracy to steal ag trade secrets, including valuable proprietary corn seeds to be transported back to China. While law enforcement has performed admirably in these and other individual cases, until recently, our federal government has lacked the tools needed to protect us from this persistent and systematic threat.

There are three primary ways in which the Chinese Communist Party has used gaps in regulations and enforcement to undermine our farm security.

First, it has exploited the many weaknesses in the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) to dodge reporting requirements and obscure the scale and purpose of CCP land ownership in the U.S. The law requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue an annual report detailing foreign purchases of U.S. ag land. Its most recent report, from 2023, catalogued 421,423 total acres either owned primarily or in part by the PRC or Hong Kong–based companies. Until last week, AFIDA had lacked serious deterrent measures for non-reporting.

For example, FuFeng Group, a PRC-owned agricultural manufacturer that purchased land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, was fined only $1,387 for a late filing. Smithfield, a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise and the largest pork producer in the United States, was fined a measly $120 each for late filings in multiple counties. Also, AFIDA did not provide an online filing option, did not include key geospatial information on the land in question, and did not even require disclosure of the purpose for the land purchase.

Second, in many cases, CCP-owned interests have thwarted the oversight efforts of federal committees, such as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), that are tasked with protecting our land and infrastructure. The case of the aforementioned FuFeng group purchase was deemed to be outside of the committee’s jurisdiction despite its close proximity to a sensitive military site. CFIUS also declined to intervene when a Chinese billionaire purchased a 10,000-acre parcel of Texas land that sits along the training flight paths of Laughlin Air Force Base.

Finally, the CCP continues to leverage weaknesses in our government and university research ecosystems to steal American intellectual property and threaten our food supply chains by placing CCP-sympathizing researchers in our labs or co-opting American experts, with the University of Michigan “fungus arrest” being perhaps the most dangerous case. For example, most laboratories that receive federal research funding have still not fully implemented National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, a directive from the first Trump administration meant to increase security at government and government-funded research programs.

The good news is that the days of federal complacency in confronting this threat are over. Last month, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins launched her National Farm Security Action Plan, a necessary road map to secure America’s agricultural future. The plan is informed by a deep understanding of the coordinated, strategic, whole-of-society approach by the Chinese Communist Party to weaken America from within.

The plan closes the glaring gaps in our nation’s farm security. It increases penalties issued under AFIDA, sharpening it into a vital tool for enforcement and recordkeeping, by hitting late, false, or incomplete filings with a fee equal to 25 percent of the land’s value. In addition, the USDA signed a joint memorandum with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to add the secretary of agriculture to the committee. This will ensure regular coordination regarding foreign transactions involving agricultural businesses, agricultural biotechnology, and the agricultural industry. Further, the plan secures our agricultural research from malign foreign influence, examines departmental security clearances for appropriate scale and scope, and promotes America First values throughout the USDA, including nutrition and rural development programs. U.S. senators and representatives, as well as governors, legislators, state agricultural commissioners, and dozens of stakeholder groups have already endorsed the plan.

Our nation will not truly be secure until our agricultural land, food supply chain, and valuable research products are protected from malign foreign influences. The USDA’s new action plan is the America First path to restoring our nation’s agricultural greatness.

Kip E. Tom served as the United States ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agencies in Rome from 2019 to 2021. He is the vice chairman for rural policy at the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. Adam Savit is the director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute.