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Op Ed: Beyond the Election:
Protecting Farmland for the Future
Farmland
is vital to farmers and communities. It is vital to food production.
It is vital to every single Ontario resident. Farmland is more
than just a farmer’s field; it sustains us all by providing healthy
food and clean water and should be afforded the respect it is owed.
As the
provincial election approaches, voters hear various political soundbites regarding farmland and agriculture,
and it’s a challenge to sort fact from fiction. What the rhetoric
makes clear is that farmland and food production are everyone’s
business.
Without
farmland, there is very little food production, and agricultural land
and environmentally sensitive tracts should not form the basis of a
real-life Monopoly game. The NFU-O strongly advocates for farmland
protection and has called for the entire province to be temporarily greenbelted in order to create an intelligent,
balanced plan which can meet population growth needs while also
protecting our valuable farmland, moraines, and significant green
spaces. This protective measure would also need to take into account
the changing needs of farm families in order to support the economic
viability of those who steward the land.
Urban
sprawl gobbles up prime farmland and green space that protects key
water and natural resources and is required to feed ourselves and our
neighbours. While the current Ontario Greenbelt is a positive step to
protect land, farmland outside its boundary is vulnerable to leapfrog
development whereby developers jump over the boundary and pave over
farmland just beyond it. Farm communities outside of the Greenbelt are being being overrun by developers and speculative
buyers.
In the
report on 2017 farmland prices, Farm Credit Canada confirmed that Ontario farmland values as compared
to production capacity have now diverged, meaning non-farming
speculation is continuing to drive land value. The NFU-O is very
concerned that while the Ontario government enacted measures to “cool
down” the housing market in the GTA from foreign acquisition,
farmland is still a free-for-all with speculative values often two to
three times the productive capacity of the land.
We are
calling for an intelligent non-partisan debate around farmland
protection policy, one that goes beyond single election cycles. When
short-sighted remarks are attributed to any of our political leaders,
we must demand better. The NFU-O strongly urges our fellow eaters,
rural and urban, to speak up for the protection of prime farmland and
to ask hard questions of our candidates as they seek your vote.
Emery
Huszka is a grain farmer in Florence, ON. He is the President of
National Farmers Union–Ontario and NFU Region 3 Coordinator.
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