Sara A. Carter The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a major toll on the American food supply chain, with some companies reducing slaughter capacity.
However, many of these companies are owned by foreign investors. According to a May 2019 NPR report, “nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades.”
Smithfield Foods, Inc., owns more than 500 farms on 146,000 acres of U.S. soil. Smithfield was purchased by the Chinese company WH Group (then known as Shuanghui Group/Shineway Group), China’s largest meat producer, for $4.72 billion in 2013.
“Right out my back door here, Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has recently bought out a couple grain elevators, basically extracting the wealth out of the community,” Angela Huffman, a sixth-generation farmer in Wyandot County, Ohio, told NPR at the time.
