Florida’s new Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson wants to restrict the sale of The Sunshine State’s farmland to foreign countries after increasing concerns about what foreign buyers—namely Chinese companies closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—are doing with the agricultural land once they purchase it.
Food costs and supply are becoming a point of contention for Floridians and Americans as a whole, and there is worry that the continuation of farmland sales to foreign entities could cause food prices to be intentionally inflated or production could be shut down altogether.
According to a 2020 report from the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA), foreign ownership sits at 1,272,474 acres or 5.8 percent of the 21,849,568 acres of agricultural land in Florida. USDA data also shows that foreign ownership has significantly increased over the past few decades—in 1980, 202,101 acres or 0.8 percent of agricultural land was owned by foreign entities. By the year 2000, foreign ownership of agricultural land had hit over a million acres in Florida alone….