Foreign companies should not own Missouri farm ground, reader says

Missouri farmland should not be owned by foreign corporations, period.

This should not be a controversial statement but in our state Legislature, corporate agriculture lobbyists rule over good sense and the will of Missouri residents.

Since 2015, foreign corporations have been allowed to purchase a virtually unlimited amount of our precious and limited farmland.

As a consequence, Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods now owns over 40,000 acres of prime Missouri farmland, and, because of a 2015 loophole, we don’t even know how much of our farmland is under foreign corporate ownership today.

This puts our food security and national security at risk as foreign corporations like Smithfield Foods will use our farmland to produce food that will likely be sent back to China and not available for domestic use. We will likely never get that land back.

It is time for us to let our state elected “representatives” know that we’re aware that they sold our state and nation down the river and put our food supply at risk for some campaign donations.

Now they need to put greed aside and fix this law before we face grave consequences for their short-sightedness.

We must demand that the Missouri Legislature create a law that stops all future purchases of Missouri farmland by foreign corporate interests and that forces the Missouri Department of Agriculture to determine exactly how much of our farmland is currently under foreign corporate ownership.

We must do our part now to reclaim our farmland for family farms and rural communities and protect our food supply before the next crisis hits.

Erman Call is from Columbia, Missouri.