Virginia will ban foreign adversaries, including China, from buying agricultural land in the Commonwealth, effective Jan. 1, 2023. The House bill passed both chambers of the General Assembly on Friday. With the Senate version passing two weeks ago, the bill is poised to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin soon.

Prohibiting China from buying Virginia’s farmland was on top of Youngkin’s legislative agenda this year. “Virginians—not the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]—should own the rich and vibrant agricultural lands God has blessed us with. That is why I am asking the General Assembly to send me a bill to prohibit dangerous foreign entities tied to the CCP from purchasing Virginia farmland,” he said in his State of the Commonwealth address at the beginning of the 2023 legislative session. “The stakes are too high, and the consequences are too great.”

The new law will also require Virginia’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) to publish an annual report of foreign land ownership to the governor and General Assembly. The inaugural report is due on the VDACS website by July 1. The new law, when enacted, will not affect any transactions that were completed before this year. Virginia’s definition of foreign adversaries follows the Department of Commerce’s designation. Along with China, the current list also includes Cuba, Russia, North Korea, and a Venezuelan politician.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Chinese entities currently own about 14,000 acres of agricultural land in Virginia as of the end of 2021, most of which is tied to the 2013 purchase of Smithfield Foods Inc., the largest pork producer in the United States.

However, foreign land ownership reporting to the USDA has been largely an honor system; the reporting requirements are not always enforced. Although the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) stipulates that the penalty for failing to report foreign land ownership goes up to a quarter of the property’s market value, in reality, the USDA often reduces the penalty amount significantly for fear of disincentivizing filing. For example, the fine for a Chinese company’s failure to report the land purchase associated with the Blue Hills Wind Farm project in Texas decreased to $120,000 from $21 million.

According to the University of Arkansas’s National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), as of February 2023, 28 states, including Virginia, Texas, and Florida, don’t have any restrictions on foreign ownership of agricultural land. Virginia will soon prohibit Chinese entities from owning any interest in its agricultural land. In Texas and Florida, bills have been introduced to restrict not only Chinese farmland ownership but also any real estate purchase.

Instead of the acreage, Youngkin emphasized the military assets in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

He told Fox News on Sunday: “In Virginia, we’re standing up strong. We’re going to make sure that our agricultural farmland is not purchased by the CCP.

“We’ve got a bill now through on a bipartisan basis that I will sign that will keep China from buying our agricultural farmland, particularly next to our national strategic assets like the Pentagon, Quantico, and the largest naval base in the world. We’re going to make sure that we keep these national strategic assets safe.”

Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter told The Epoch Times that the bill would be signed into law in the coming weeks. “The governor has been clear since day one that Virginians, their tax dollars, and their farmland should not enrich the CCP or dangerous foreign entities at the expense of national security,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

Earlier this year, a Chinese corn mill proposal in Grand Forks, North Dakota, on land that’s located within 15 miles of the Grand Forks Air Force Base, was terminated after the U.S. Air Force warned that the project poses a “significant threat to national security.”

With the Air Force’s input, the controversial project came to a screeching halt after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal panel charged with reviewing foreign acquisitions for national security risks, decided in December that it didn’t have jurisdiction to probe the land purchase.