A new global trade environment erupted last week after weeks of threats, but BC agriculture sector continues to look for solutions despite the real risk of a significant financial hit.
Volatile financial markets have raised the spectre of higher borrowing costs, reinforcing a sense of caution that has slowed property investment.
Despite an optimistic report from Farm Credit Canada in March that estimated an 11.3% increase in farmland values last year, many regions of the province were seeing properties take longer to sell.
This includes Vancouver Island, where Donna Jager, an agent with Royal LePage Qualicum Beach, says the market has been “very interesting” this year. While larger properties have taken longer to sell, she also called out the anxieties around tariffs.
“As a result of the political uncertainty around the tariffs, I think some of us are holding our collective breaths at the moment,” she says.
But a fresh focus on domestic purchasing is also a sign of hope.
“Renewed interest in buying Canadian products … (anecdotally) appears to translate into increased demand for local products, which of course helps local farmers,” she says. “In addition, there also appears to be an increased interest in food self reliance, which may also have a positive impact on the market for farm properties.”
BC ranchers are already looking homeward, curtailing cattle shipments to the US, and Ottawa has backed up the supply-managed sectors by reiterating a five-year-old promise to avoid new concessions in future trade negotiations.
This is good news for the dairy and feather groups, whose operations are centred in Abbotsford, which the Conference Board of Canada has identified as having an economy highly dependent on trade with the US.
But whereas Ontario greenhouse vegetable growers have estimated the financial impact of an initial hit of tariffs in March at $2.2 million, their counterparts in BC were more fortunate as production had yet to ramp up.
“BC growers were minimally impacted and seem to have avoided the US tariffs as there were essentially no US shipments at that time,” said Armand VanderMeulen of Bakerview Greenhouses in Abbotsford and president of the BC Greenhouse Growers Association.
VanderMeulen has been urging a rational response to the bluster from south of the border, saying counter-tariffs would simply escalate the trade tensions.
“I don’t believe that is a productive way to resolve the issues,” he says. “We have to work with the US, because failure to do that will create economic havoc.”
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