Business: The Foreign Land-Grab Scare

Xenophobic overreaction to a bit of buying in the farm belt

Few subjects scare and anger American farmers more than reports that carpetbagging foreigners are swallowing up U.S. agricultural land from Georgia to California. To hear many farmers and farm-belt politicians tell it, at least half the population of Europe and maybe a few million Arabs and Japanese are storming ashore, moneybags in hand, to buy every spare square inch of topsoil.

Certainly some foreign purchases have occurred, and ads offering U.S. farm land dance across European newspapers and magazines. Still, aliens are neither big buyers nor big owners of land. In the unlikely event that a buying boom were to start tomorrow, it would not hurt either farmers or the country as a whole.

Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has asked the Agriculture Department and the state extension services to make a study of alien buying of U.S. farm land. Last fall Congress passed a law that will force all foreigners to register their land ownership. At least 25 states have enacted constraints of some kind on foreign land holdings.

This is part of a xenophobic overreaction that has been sparked by alarmist reports in the press and on TV and by flag-waving, vote-hungry politicians. The foreign buyers, says Marcus Collins, a state representative in Georgia "come in here and pay $1,500, $1,800 or even $2,000 an acre for land that, even with inflation, should not cost more than $800." Iowa Congressman Tom Harkin warns that the oil-producing nations, which sold the U.S. $45 billion worth of petroleum last year, "could buy the whole state of Iowa, every acre of farm producing land, with just 394 days of oil production."

The chance of the Arabs' wanting to put all their cash into one breadbasket seems remote, and the scare stories are based on phony evidence or plain prejudice. When asked to back up his claim that "thousands and thousands of acres are being bought up," California State Assemblyman John Thurman cited one "foreign" farm in California; in fact, it is owned by an American of Iranian descent. Under questioning, Tom Harkin admitted that foreign land buying "has not yet affected Iowa."

Nor has it affected much of the rest of the U.S. Last June the GAO surveyed 25 counties in five states (California, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma) and discovered that foreigners own no more than three-tenths of 1% of the farm land. The Department of Agriculture figures that, of 1 billion acres of privately owned farm land, only 3 million to 5 million acres are in foreign hands.

Some farming states have done surveys of their own, and these agree that the fear has been exaggerated:

> Iowa has been monitoring ownership of its 33 million acres of farm land for three years and has discovered that there are all of 27 nonresident alien owners, most of them West Germans; together, they have less than 9,000 acres.

> Minnesota has required reporting of foreign land buyers since 1977. Only 29,000 of its 30 million acres are foreign controlled. Last year, there was not a single sale of land to a nonresident alien.