NPR had a piece on foreigners buying up agricultural land. It's not clear where the correspondent's data comes from, but I'd suspect it's reports under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act..
I remember when the law was enacted in 1978. That was when foreigners were rolling in dollars, partly because OPEC had successfully raised the price of oil, Nixon had taken us off the gold standard, and Japan was starting to sell cars (bought my first Toyota in that year) to us. Those dollars were being used to buy land, causing concerns in the U.S. That resulted in the act, requiring buyers to report their ownership to ASCS/FSA.
The regulations to implement the act were always questionable--basically it was a stand-alone requirement to report in its own little silo, with no interface to the rest of ASCS functions. That meant there was no real enforcement, except the good will of the buyers and the conscientiousness of the county office. But we had no way to ensure the buyers knew the requirement.. And we had no way to get data on sales by foreign buyers.
As a result, when someone looked at the AFIDA database in 2014, they found problems. I'd have my doubts that it's been fixed since.
In the back of my mind I wanted to integrate AFIDA into the farm records system as we re-engineered it from the System/36 to the new platform. But it never happened, never became important enough to devote the people to it, and I got fed up and retired. I strongly suspect in the 20 years since no one involved in the redesign of FSA operations was conscious enough of AFIDA to include it in the redesign. Such is the fate of silos; they don't have enough significance to attract attention.
I did a search on this blog to see if I'd written on AFIDA before. I did a couple times in 2008, but using the FSA label. One post did refer to FSA's AFIDA reports. They're available here. But the web page hasn'te been updated for 5 years, a fact which supports my overall take on the subject.
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