Opinion: Iowans need to be wary of growing competition with China

In today’s hyper-politicized environment, the growing competition between the United States and China is one of the few areas that engenders support on both sides of the aisle. For years, China has been stealing our intellectual property and its actions in the South China Sea have become increasingly hostile; it is no secret that President Xi Jinping aspires to “reunify” China with Taiwan.

Let us also not forget the Chinese surveillance balloon that crossed the continental US earlier this year. The bipartisan support for examining the threat China poses to the US and our values led the current Congress to create the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, led by Midwesterners Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat.

Yet, the US-China competition is not just an issue for elected officials and policymakers in Washington, DC, but one that concerns farmers across the country, including in Iowa. As Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley noted in a recent interview, whether it’s “scooping up US farmland or absorbing input suppliers, China has made no secret that it is targeting American agriculture.” Indeed, since 2019, Beijing has nearly doubled its land ownership in the US, from 191,652 acres to 383,935.

Increasingly, we see more and more agricultural roads leading to and from China. According to the USDA, China passed the US and the EU in 2019 to become the world’s largest agricultural importer. And last year, the US exported $36.4 billion worth of agricultural goods to China, our largest export market for the second consecutive year.

China is also one of Iowa’s largest trading partners. This is no surprise as Iowa boasts one of the most productive agricultural industries on the planet; we rank first in the US in both hog and corn production. And our capabilities attract some of the largest agribusinesses in the world, including Chinese-owned companies.

However, China is absorbing global input suppliers and playing an outsized role in the agriculture market while the US industry continues to experience consolidation. For nearly four decades, cropland has shifted from midsize (between 100 and 999 acres) to large operations (2,000 or more acres). The issue has become so acute that legislation was introduced in the Senate last year to place a moratorium on acquisitions and mergers in the food and agriculture sector.

With these dual dynamics at play, Iowans should be wary of China’s ambitions in our state, and seek avenues to diminish its influence. In Washington, legislation to treat foreign control of farmland and businesses as a national security threat is gaining support among Democrats and Republicans. Though Canadian owners top the list of foreign countries with US holdings, the focus is on exposing and limiting China and Russia’s ownership.

Other options, especially for solutions providers, include supporting efforts by Chinese-owned companies with a strong American presence to go public. For example, Syngenta, which many Iowans may be familiar with due to its crop protection capabilities or as the provider of the Cropwise digital farm-management software, has been seeking an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. However, the IPO was unexpectedly called off without explanation from the authorities. If this continues, perhaps Syngenta should seek to IPO on another exchange.

Becoming a publicly traded company would at once diversify a company’s shareholders and investor base, thereby wresting influence away from Beijing. In the case of Syngenta, which is currently owned by ChemChina, an IPO would dilute China’s influence by transferring ownership to private individuals around the world. This would be a win for the company, its shareholders, and American farmers.

Finally, as a former Iowa state representative who had the privilege to spend time in Taiwan, I can tell you firsthand that Taiwan's continued existence as a free and democratic country is crucial to United States agriculture. Taiwan now ranks sixth in the total value of U.S. agricultural and related products exported. These products include corn, soybeans, dairy, beef and poultry all of which are very important to Iowa agriculture. The loss of these exports to Taiwan would be devastating to the agriculture economy.

Iowa has an important role to play in the US, and thus global, agriculture market. Particularly in this new era of great power competition, the potential for global food shortages is more prevalent than ever; last year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine erased a Belgium-sized area worth of crops and significantly curtailed production of the world’s largest producer of sunflower seed oil. Supporting efforts to ensure our farmers and farmland are secure is a bipartisan effort, one that every Iowan can get behind.

Bruce Bearinger of Oelwein was a state representative from 2013 to 2021, and served as ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opinion: Iowans should be wary of growing competition with China