Sen. Cramer Discusses National Security Concerns Regarding Fufeng Farmland Purchase Near Grand Forks Air Force Base on America Reports

Statement

U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Excerpts and full video are below.

On National Security Concerns:

"I am worried about it because China has proven themselves to be both capable and more than willing to steal intellectual property, to intercept the data, and they're very good at it. Grand Forks is not only an important Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance base, it's a reconnaissance wing that flies Global Hawks. We recently cut the ribbon on a new satellite ground station for low Earth-orbiting satellites that will soon be providing communications in the sky. The future of the Grand Forks Air Force Base is… the next generation of ISR flying vehicle -- unmanned aerial systems. So it's a very important base."

"On the farm side, we see China continually buying up more and more of the U.S. food supply chain. Now, we grow a lot more food than we consume and we're happy to sell it to hungry people around the world. We're very good at that. But when the supply chain becomes more captive, not only to foreign ownership but to foreign adversaries like China who have demonstrated that they're not to be trusted with supply chains. We just went through a pandemic that exposed a lot of that. I'm just not very comfortable with the Chinese Communist Party controlling so much of our supply chains. Food supply, energy supply, pharmaceutical supply, those are all that's all part of national security."

On the Need for a CFIUS Review of the Fufeng Farmland Purchase:

"A lot of this came to light when Senators Rubio, Hoeven, and I requested a CFIUS review -- CFIUS being the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. We sent a letter to the Committee's chairman, which is of course, Janet Yellen, Secretary of Treasury. It is made up of about 14 Cabinet and White House officials in the intelligence, law enforcement, and security agencies. They'll identify major concerns, minor concerns, or maybe there's no concern… I'm fairly confident there will be a lot of concerns raised by intelligence, defense, and security forces and those will be heard at the local level."

On the City of Grand Forks' Guardrails and Clawbacks:

"The community of Grand Forks did a wonderful job of putting in guardrails and clawbacks. Communities have to protect themselves from the type of predatory investing that China has proven to be very good at. [Grand Forks] protected themselves in their assets very well. So I'm confident this will all turn out well, and at the end, we'll have a unified community that supports the final decision."

On China as a Nefarious Partner:

"If China doesn't benefit from an investment in North Dakota, why would they make an investment North Dakota? That would be my first question. Obviously, China benefits from this, and when you see what they do with their money in terms of economic dominance, in terms of upgrading their own military. As you know, the are excellent at technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and with that, they've advanced their own hypersonic missile systems and other high-tech defenses. So China benefits from it."

"The China of today has turned out to be a very nefarious China. Rather than inviting them into our backyard, we ought to have more of a strategic decoupling of our relationship with China. [We ought to] work closer with our allies, Western nations, and other Asian nations who share our values rather than having a partner so close to us that we can't trust."

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