Senate Judiciary chairman Charles Grassley is sponsoring a bill to make USDA a permanent member of the U.S. panel that decides if foreign purchases of U.S. companies impinge on national security. “This bill will raise the stature of agriculture … so we don’t make the mistake of selling too much control of our food supply to foreign countries,” Grassley told reporters.
The bill would settle a complaint raised by farm-state senators over the past couple of years, most recently with the purchase by state-owned ChemChina of Syngenta, one of the world’s largest seed and agricultural-chemical companies. The review panel, formally named the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), operates in secrecy but reportedly decided in May to give USDA a seat at the table for the ChemChina-Syngenta review. The Treasury Department chairs CFIUS.
“We need to be thinking strategically about who will control our food supply tomorrow,” said Grassley, after referring to the purchase by a Chinese company of Smithfield Foods, based in Virginia, in 2013. Grassley said foreign companies control half of hog slaughter capacity in the United States.