AFIDA and Congress

 CRS has a paper on the issue of foreign ownership of agricultural land in preparation for the upcoming farm bill.  Two items of note--about half the acreage included in FSA's AFIDA data is forest land (apparently a lot of which is in Maine) and China doesn't show up in the discussion of the owners of the most land.

They mention possible problems in FSA's data, including a request to GAO to look at it.  I am sure there are problems. 

AFIDA Holes

 This points to possible problems in how FSA enforces the AFIDA legislation. I once was responsible for that.  I hoped someday to integrate AFIDA reports into the general system for updating land ownership once we got a common geospatial database with SCS.  

I retired before that happened.  It sounds as if it hasn't happened since.  Just another silo.

China and Farmland

 Once again people are getting upset by the idea of citizens of a rising Asian power buying American farmland. See this and this.

As I blogged previously, this is an old story. Back in the 1970's Congress passed  AFIDA, but back then it wasn't China which was the perceived threat.  China was a poor backwards country struggling under communism.  Instead it was Japan, which was selling us cars, not electronics, and using a few of the dollars they got to buy real estate, some agricultural land, some urban properties including Rockefeller Center.

In the long run who owns what is determined by economics.  Japan's star has faded, China's risen.  In the next 30 years it may be India or Nigeria which has the money to buy some land.  

AFIDA Reports and Foreign Ownership of Agricultural Land

I posted earlier this year on the issue of foreigners buying agricultural land.  At that time I found an obsolete link to FSA AFIDA reports (last updated in 2012).

The other day I saw a hysterical tweet on the same subject, with Tamar Haspel (a good writer on food issues) countering.

This morning for no reason I decided to Google AFIDA and found the active list of FSA AFIDA reports. The last report on this one is for 2016.

It starts with:

Foreign individuals and entities reported holding an interest in 28.3 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of December 31, 2016. This is 2.2 percent of all privately held U.S. agricultural land and approximately 1 percent of all land in the United States (see fig. 1 for State-level detail).

NPR and Furriners Buying Our Land

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.