Participating in the global agricultural value chain is an important measure to safeguard a country’s food security and enhance its competitiveness and influence of the agricultural industry. Based on the TiVA database and the UN COMTRADE database， this paper estimates the participation and status of 64 countries in the global agricultural value chain， uses social network analysis to construct a network of global agricultural foreign investment outflow， and empirically analyzes the impact of the agricultural foreign investment layout on a country’s participation in the global agricultural value chain. The results show that the global network of agricultural foreign investment outflow is currently dominated by developed countries. Network centrality and network heterogeneity have a significant positive effect on a country’s position in global value chain， that is， the higher a country’s centrality and the more dispersed its investment， the higher its position in the value chain. Network scale has a negative impact， and the advantages of scaling up blindly is difficult to offset the high risks of agricultural foreign investment outflow. Based on the research findings， this article proposes suggestions for improving the status of the value chain by optimizing the layout of agricultural foreign investment outflow in different links， deepening the existing agricultural foreign investment outflow network， and gradually intergrating into the network dominated by developed countries.