WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is launching an aggressive, multi-agency effort to protect America’s farmlands, food supply and critical research from the influence and control of China and other adversarial foreign nations — including banning the purchase of US farmland by Chinese nationals.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins joined several cabinet officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi and trade adviser Peter Navarro — on Tuesday to announce the National Farm Security Action Plan.
The multi-agency effort, which will involve legislative and executive actions at the federal and state level, will strengthen US agricultural research and safeguard it from malign foreign influence, intellectual property theft, and the growing threat of agroterrorism, Rollins told reporters Monday.
The move comes after a pair of Chinese researchers were federally charged in June after trying to smuggle a dangerous crop-killing fungus into the US, according to the FBI.
“We’re tracking and very well aware of the Michigan case, but there are others as well,” Rollins told The Post Monday.
Rollins said the US Department of Agriculture and other agencies will be banning the purchase of farmland by Chinese nationals as well as “eliminating all [departmental] agreements going to people and entities in countries of concern or other foreign adversaries.”
“Too much American land is owned by nationals of adversarial countries, and more than 265,000 acres in the United States are owned by Chinese nationals, much of which is located near critical US military bases,” Rollins also told reporters Monday. That translates to 414 square miles — nearly 90% the size of New York City.
A Post review found at least 19 of those installations from Florida to Hawaii were close enough to allow the Chinese Communist Party to surveil US military operations via drones, radar, infrared scanning or other tracking technologies.
The agriculture secretary also pledged to immediately prioritize “all USDA funding in America for American-made technology, research and innovation.”
The USDA will partner with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which in 2018 received a grant proposal that laid out a “blueprint” for creating the virus causing COVID-19, according to scientists, lawmakers, public health and intelligence officials.
The grant proposal, which was never funded, “downplayed” how some of the research would be taking place at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Some public health experts, such as former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield, have since suggested that even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
The USDA itself had been collaborating on “highly pathogenic” bird flu experiments with a researcher affiliated with one of the Wuhan lab’s divisions focused on special pathogens — before being exposed by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) last year.
Rollins, in a congressional hearing in May, committed to ending the collaboration, which was receiving up to $1 million in US taxpayer funding to conduct the experiments from April 2021 to March 2026.
Other items in the action plan include reforming the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act to hike civil penalties for late or false filings to 25% of the fair market value of the land.
The USDA’s food stamp program will also be further reviewed to ensure transnational criminal gangs aren’t “stealing from the poor and the American taxpayer by cloning point-of-sale devices and card skimming.”
Retailers complicit in SNAP or other benefit fraud schemes will also lose their funding. The USDA spends more than $405 million per day on the various programs.
Additionally, the USDA will begin compiling lists of supply chain items for the agriculture industry that come from foreign adversaries and propose solutions.
Republican Govs. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Jim Pillen of Nebraska and Bill Lee of Tennessee were also in attendance.
“The states have really taken the lead on this,” Rollins said Monday, “I’m looking forward to working alongside our friends on the Hill [and] with the federal government to step up.”
“My hope is that this is a significant bipartisan issue that we will be able to work with some Democrat governors, some Democrat leaders across the country,” she added. “I believe that we will.
“We’re already working with some key Democrat governors on SNAP reforms and others, and that ultimately we’re all in this to protect our country.”
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