Source: United States Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
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BISMARCK, N.D. – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined Newsmax’s American Agenda to discuss the economic and national security concerns of the Fufeng Group’s purchase of farmland near the Grand Forks Air Force Base. Excerpts and full video are below.
On Chinese Infiltration of U.S. Supply Chains
“The land purchase has already taken place. What’s at stake is the Fufeng [group], whose chairman is a very active member of the Chinese Communist Party—in fact they once labeled this person as a ‘model laborer’—wants to build this corn milling facility 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base. So there’s really a couple of things here. The first one is that China has increasingly purchased up food supply chains in the United States. They already have a significant amount of the meat processing market in the United States. Now they’ve been buying up farmland as well as investing in value-added agriculture supply chain companies. This is significant because, as we saw throughout the pandemic, China has a lock on a lot of supply chains. They own 75% of solar panels… pharmaceuticals, the personal protective equipment, but certainly food as well.”
On Economic and National Security Concerns:
“The proximity to the Grand Forks Air Force Base is the issue that has most people concerned because the Grand Forks Air Force Base is an [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] (ISR) base. It’s a Reconnaissance wing. What that means is they fly unmanned aerial vehicles around the world. They rely on a lot of data from space, to the aircraft, to the earth—up and down. We just recently cut the ribbon on a Space Development Agency ground station that would be operating low-earth orbiting satellites. There’s a new mission coming to the Grand Forks Air Force Base in the middle of this decade that would be next generation ISR. So there’s a lot of concern about Chinese investment so close to such a sensitive base.”
“You’d have to be naïve not to believe [the Chinese] are up to something and we’ve seen a lot of that in recent years. The China of ten years ago, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago is very different than the China of today. We know how good they are at spying. We know how good they are at collecting data in both passive and aggressive ways and we know how often they do it.”
On Community Concerns:
“With regard to constituents, constituents are very concerned. They’ve sounded the alarm in the community of Grand Forks. They signed petitions, and yet, local leaders have taken a much slower process, if you will, of due [diligence] on this investment opportunity.”
On the CFIUS Process:
“You asked if the Biden Administration could be compelled to stop this. Well, they actually can through a process called CFIUS—the [Committee] on Foreign Investment in the United States. That [committee] is led by the Secretary of the Treasury and includes all of our agencies such as Commerce and of course both the security and intelligence agencies. They’re taking a good look at it right now, and they will make some determination I would think within days. That determination will be shared with the company and, of course with Members of Congress that seek some insight. My sense of it is [this project] is not going to happen. I firmly believe that before this is done, this transaction will be stopped and unwound. The local leaders want to see the process played out.”