The total area of land in foreign ownership in the USA has already passed 19 million hectares. The fastest growth in forest land purchases has been recorded in Texas and Maine.

Canadian forest managers are keen to buy private plantations from the Americans on which southern yellow pine is grown. These are grown on forest land totalling more than 77 million hectares across the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Land suitable for forestry currently makes up 47% of all foreign-owned land in the USA. Over the course of a year, foreign investors have acquired more than 526 thousand hectares of forest and agricultural land. According to a report published by the Farm Service Agency of the US Department of Agriculture, the area of land in foreign ownership has risen from 10.8 million hectares in 2017 to more than 19 million hectares at present. Over the past eight years, foreign businesses have invested their funds very actively in buying up forest and agricultural land in the USA.

Although foreigners have bought land from Americans in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico, it should be stressed that it is in Texas, where landowners have sold more than 2.38 million hectares, and in Maine, with 1.4 million hectares of land sold, that foreign investors have bought forests in the greatest quantities. “In percentage terms, roughly 21.3% of Maine's private land belongs to foreign investors, which is about 7.6% of the registered foreign-owned agricultural land in the USA,” the report states.

Canadians own the largest share of foreign-held land – 34%. The report notes: “Dutch nationals own 10%, Germans 6%, Italians 6% and British nationals also 6%. Representatives of these countries control 27% of all foreign-owned forest and land holdings in the USA. The remaining 39% of all registered foreign-owned agricultural and forest land belongs to citizens and companies of other countries. Chinese investors, for example, own 99,000 hectares, which is a considerably smaller area than that held by nationals of other countries.”

A Chinese technology billionaire who, according to information sources, has links to the Chinese government has quietly acquired a total of 280,000 hectares of forest land in North America. This businessman is said to be driving the efforts of foreign interest groups to buy forest land in the USA both for timber and for carbon credits, according to a The Land Report report in which Tianqiao Chen (Tianqiao Chen), founder of the Chinese online gaming giant Shanda Interactive Entertainment, is listed as the second-largest “foreign-national landowner in North America” and the owner of the largest single forest holding in the United States. The US government does not look favourably on this situation in land ownership and is beginning to take countermeasures.

Under the current administration, US officials have moved against the influx of foreign investors into the country's agriculture and land management sector. The US Department of Agriculture, by improving and stepping up the monitoring and disclosure systems at its disposal under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, is beginning to take firm measures to restrict purchases of forest and land in the USA by foreign nationals.