Bubba Pettit says he knew that foreigners had been acquiring cropland in the Delta for decades, but it wasn’t until three or four years ago that he learned they also owned tens of thousands of acres of timberland in his home county of Attala.
The 73-year-old tree farmer and retired real estate lawyer from Kosciusko is now on a crusade to get Mississippi to enforce a more-than-century-old ban on foreign ownership of agricultural land.
“It’s killing us,” Pettit said of foreign ownership.
The issue has exploded nationally in the past year, mostly over concerns about Chinese ownership of American assets.
Prior to this year, Mississippi and 13 other states already had laws prohibiting or restricting foreign ownership and investments in farmland. In 2023, according to The National Agriculture Law Center at the University of Arkansas, 35 states looked at either enacting such bans for the first time or clarifying the ones on their books. Ten of these states, mostly in the South, enacted new laws, and two others amended existing ones.
Congress is also considering federal restrictions. Presently there are none, although a 1978 law keeps tabs on the level of foreign ownership by requiring foreign investors who acquire, transfer, or hold an interest in U.S. agricultural land to report such holdings and transactions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That recordkeeping shows that in 2021, the latest year reported, more than 777,000 acres of land in Mississippi, the majority of it timberland, is owned by foreign investors. Although that represents less than 3% of all agricultural land in the state, it’s worth about $2 billion.
In Leflore County, foreign interests own more than 17,000 acres. In Carroll County, it’s close to 19,000 acres. In Pettit’s Attala County, it’s nearly 45,000 acres.
Had a 1892 law been enforced, the numbers should be closer to zero. That law limits foreign ownership to no more than 320 acres for industrial development and 5 acres for residential purposes.
Until around 1980, foreign ownership of land in Mississippi apparently did not exist. But during a time when Delta farmers were struggling, some of them began selling land to overseas investors, who were eager to buy land in this country because of the scarcity and price of it in their own countries.
Much of the movement to restrict land ownership focuses on four nations — China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — that are major adversaries of the U.S. The majority of the foreign ownership, however, actually comes from Canada and four also friendly Western European nations — the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. The Dutch alone account for 46% of the foreign ownership in Mississippi and 31% nationwide. Chinese ownership, while growing, is still less than 1%.
A large chunk of the Dutch ownership in this state originated in 2006, when International Paper Co., as part of a massive land sale, turned over hundreds of thousands of Mississippi acres to an investment group whose primary owner is a Dutch pension fund for metal workers.
Pettit is particularly critical of Attorney General Lynn Fitch for not enforcing the ban on foreign ownership, but that disinterest also predates her by at least four attorneys general.
Earlier this year, the state Legislature created a committee, chaired by Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, to study the issue of foreign ownership and make recommendations by Dec. 1.
The committee has met monthly since August. Its discussions have illustrated the tensions that exist in trying to decide what to do. In Mississippi, there’s a longstanding resistance toward government infringement on personal liberty, including what owners do with their private property. There’s also disagreement about whether foreign ownership provides more benefit than harm.
Meredith Allen, a member of the committee and a retired CEO of Greenwood-based cotton cooperative Staplcotn, believes that restrictions on foreign ownership beyond adversarial nations would be detrimental to Mississippi landowners and farmers. Eliminating all foreign buyers would lower land values, he said. Plus foreign owners are good landlords, allowing the farmers who rent from them to “make a good living for their family farming the land.”
Pettit agrees that land values are boosted by foreign ownership, but he claims the downsides outweigh that advantage. Inflated land prices “kill your entrepreneurial class,” he said. “The young farmers in the Delta cannot compete. If their daddy didn’t have a huge farm, they can’t go out and buy a thousand acres of land or 800 acres of farmland and compete with the foreigners because they will pay more money for it.”
He also believes that foreign ownership is contributing to the region’s decline, since he claims foreign owners don’t contribute to the communities where their holdings are located the way that Mississippi-based ownership does.
“They’re just taking all that money and going back to Europe with it,” Pettit said.
Most of the study committee’s discussions so far suggest that it is leaning toward recommending something along the lines of what Arkansas has done, which targets investments by nine countries unfriendly to the U.S.
Pettit argues, however, that the current blanket ban does not need to be pared down but rather enforced. The only modification he would make is to give current foreign owners three to five years to sell their land before it would be forfeited to the state.
Mississippi doesn’t need foreign investment or expertise to manage its land, Pettit said. It’s not as if growing trees is rocket science.
“You plant ’em, you thin ’em, you cut ’em.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
