Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU), a farmers rights and issues advocacy group, has released a report on the growing concern of farm land purchases by huge investment operations, agri-bizz, and foreign interests.
The NFU had been seeing for many years that investors, corporations, and even foreign sources were buying up large tracts of productive farmland all across Canada as investments, or to provide for foreign countries food security.
Matt Gehl is a mixed grain farmer in Saskatchewan and a board member of the NFU
Listen
The report is called “ Losing Our Grip-2015 update” and it looks at how the individual Canadian farmer is being squeezed out of the business through lax policies on ownership, transfers and artificially increased land prices. This is happening to a large extent through policies in Canada allowing purchases of critical farmland by entities with vast cash reserves interested not in farming but as an investment for short term profits, or by extremely wealthy offshore interests buying Canadian land for that country’s food needs.
In terms of corporate investment and short term profits, this is accomplished either through simply flipping the land at a profit to the next investor, or through heavy industrial scale farming practices which deplete the soil in a few years after which the land is later sold at a higher price to the next investor. In either case this artificially boosts the price of land so that young Canadians wanting to get into farming are priced out of the market, or remain burdened for years with heavy debt loads.
The process also results in the deaths of many small towns across the country as families are moved off the land, and contractors move in for the absentee landlords.
Another concern raised is that of foreign investment (land grab) where food production from the foreign-owned land is entirely contracted to be shipped offshore to the owner country.
The NFU report notes that since 2008, farmland prices have doubled across the country.
The report also notes a substantial loss of quality farmland, in the several millions of acres, due to industrial and urban development.
The NFU hopes that through reports like this, federal and provincial governments will act of their several recommendations.
This includes working towards creation of rules limiting vital farmland ownership to people or cooperatives living in the province where the land is located. They also suggest monitoring of foreign ownership and control of land, as well as better incentives for young farmers such as reduced taxation, and less costly intergenerational transfer of the land.
They also strongly recommend that quality farmland be protected from commercial or urban development or other non-agricultural use as an additional means of providing food sovereignty into the future.
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.