Renata Kiss, FISM News
[elfsight_social_share_buttons id=”1″]
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced this week that under a new state law limiting foreign ownership of U.S. farmland, China-owned agtech company Syngenta is forced to give up 160 acres in Craighead County, amid national security concerns. The governor said that the company has used the land for “seed research” targeting American agriculture.
“Seeds are technology,” Sanders said. “Chinese state-owned corporations filter that technology back to their homeland stealing American research and telling our enemies how to target American farms.”
In addition to selling the land, the company was also ordered to pay $280,000 in civil penalties for failing to report its land ownership to the state on time. The company has 30 days to pay the penalty or face further consequences in court.
Syngenta criticized the government’s move saying that its “research and project development” is mainly used to benefit the U.S. market. Spokesman Saswato Das called Arkansas’ action “shortsighted” for failing to take into account potential economic pitfalls.
“Our people in Arkansas are Americans led by Americans who care deeply about serving Arkansas farmers,” a statement from the company reads. “This action hurts Arkansas farmers more than anyone else.”
Syngenta Group is one of the world’s biggest agtech companies, operating in 100 countries, according to its website. Its Arkansas location has been in operation since 1988, and it was bought by Chinese-owned company ChemChina in 2017 for $43 billion. Overall, the corporation owns 1,500 acres of agricultural land in the U.S.
But Syngenta is only one of the many Chinese-owned companies in the U.S. One agricultural news source reports that Chinese businesses and investors currently own about 380,000 acres of U.S. land.
Arkansas isn’t the first state to deal with Chinese-owned agricultural companies. Earlier this year, North Dakota reversed course on a Chinese-backed corn mill construction project worth $700 million and located only 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base.
In May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took similar action when he signed three bills into law blocking China from acquiring land, collecting data on U.S. citizens, and influencing the education system in the state. DeSantis called the Chinese Communist Party the “greatest geopolitical threat to the U.S.”