Foreign investors are buying up farmland right next to U.S. military bases, and it's happening way too often to be a coincidence.
Chinese-linked land holdings cluster near sensitive military sites at triple the rate of random chance. This provides the first hard empirical data for a national security concern that has long been dismissed as mere suspicion.
Spatial Clustering of Foreign Agricultural Acquisitions Near U.S. Military Installations: Comparative Evidence from USDA Primary Data
SSRN · 6454202
<span>Despite active federal legislation targeting foreign agricultural land purchases near U.S. military installations, no peer-reviewed study has applied formal spatial hypothesis testing to the core empirical question: does the observed proximity pattern exceed random chance, and is it specific to adversarial-nation investors? This paper addresses both questions using USDA Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) detailed holdings data for 2020 through 2024 — the federal governm