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New wave of agricultural land-grabs reaches Canada
The Dominion | 27 September 2010
by Amy Miller
MONTREAL—In an age of escalating food insecurity and financial uncertainty, large corporations, investors, and even nations states have been stalking the globe in pursuit of an age-old and certain commodity: farmland. Bought up on a large scale to secure food for cropstarved countries or to make a safe investment, farmland is becoming the lucrative prize of a new resource frontier. The sweep of agricultural land grabs has stripped small farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia of control over vital tracts of fertile land. And quietly, these modern-day land marauders are coming to Canada—undermining family farms, compromising local food sovereignty, and harming the environment.
This past July the National Farmers Union (NFU) sounded the alarm. In a report entitled “Losing Our Grip: How a Corporate Farmland Buy-up, Rising Farm Debt, and Agribusiness Financing of Inputs Threaten Family Farms and Food Sovereignty,” the union documents how foreign ownership of farmland in Canada is no longer a theoretical fear. It’s happening.
Investor group Walton International is buying up farmland across Alberta and has now moved into Ontario, converting farmland into “development-ready property”—what critics say is a euphemism for development geared towards urban sprawl. According to its website, Walton “manages approximately 36,000 acres on behalf of over 35,000 investors worldwide.”
News has broken recently about Quebec-based Monaxxion, representing Chinese financiers, which seeks to purchase 99,000 acres of land across Canada. La Terre de chez nous, the publication of the Union des producteurs agricoles, the Quebec farm union, has reported that Monaxxion describes its clients as “high net worth investors”—one investor, according to the report, is looking to pick up $30 million in land, and another has a personal wealth of $2 billion.
And Agcapita, a Calgary-based investment fund, has scooped up between 30,000 and 60,000 acres of farmland, mostly in Saskatchewan. “I’m convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time,” US commodities guru and advisor to Agcapita Jim Rogers told Fortune Magazine in 2009.
Kevin Wipf from NFU’s head office in Regina believes such sentiments are cause for grave concern.
“Farmland is food land and we believe protecting the family farm and protecting local food systems is vitally important,” Wipf said. “When you have foreign investors coming to purchase land solely for the sake of investing, you are losing the sovereignty over food land, those local food systems and control over your land base. And they won’t have the same concern for the environment and sustainability that we believe a local farmer would have.”
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