The U.S. Department of Agriculture will be working to implement a new, seven-point plan to make America’s farms and food supply more secure, it announced Tuesday.
The agriculture, defense and homeland security secretaries, as well as the U.S. attorney general, introduced the plan Tuesday at a news conference, signifying that all four departments would play a role in the plan’s execution. The plan aims to further advance President Donald Trump’s America First agenda in the agriculture sector by making America less dependent on foreign countries for its food supply and disentangling American agriculture from potentially harmful foreign influence.
“Food policy is national security policy. A country who cannot feed itself, cannot take care of itself, and cannot provide for itself is not secure,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “We have to be able to feed ourselves to make sure that no other country ever controls us…We will never let any other country control our food supply or control our people because we will always be the great United States of America.”
Several points of the plan directly respond to security incidents that have made national news, like China’s ownership of farmland near American military bases and the University of Michigan Chinese research fellow who was charged with smuggling samples of a toxic plant fungus into the U.S.
“The Chinese owning of farmland in our country is a massive national security issue,” said Secretary of Agrciulture Brooke Rollins at a cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Rollins said that the administration would be working with Congress to push forward legislation that would better protect American farmland from foreign ownership, mirroring on the federal level what some states, like Arkansas, Nebraska and Tennessee, have done. The governors of those states were part of the news conference announcing the new plan Tuesday.
Rollins said “it is time” that Congress “step up and catch up” to states on the issue.
Besides protecting American farmland, the plan seeks to boost U.S. manufacturing that will support American agriculture, end foreign fraud and exploitation of American food assistance programs and defend American agricultural reseach and innovation from foreign interference. It will also “put America first in every USDA program,” erect greater safeguards against bio-threats, and treat “farms, food and supply chains” as “national security assets.
Rollins said Tuesday’s announcement was “just the start” and that Trump would soon sign an executive order along the same lines.
