BURNABY – The Agricultural Land Commission has come out swinging against the province’s proposal to eliminate a rule requiring processors located in the Agricultural Land Reserve to source at least half their ingredients from BC growers.
“The proposal represents a significant policy shift that has not been supported by evidence demonstrating the need for change or showing that the proposed change would increase agricultural production, improve farm viability, or enhance food security within British Columbia,” ALC chair Jennifer Dyson writes in an August 21 letter to BC agriculture minister Lana Popham.
Dyson notes that by creating a new industrial-use entitlement on protected farmland, despite being limited to Class 4-7 soils, the proposal is fundamentally opposed to encouraging primary agricultural production.
“The commission is alarmed not only with the immediate impact of the proposal, but also with its cumulative effect on the agricultural land base,” Dyson writes, noting that agriculture ministry staff have noted the potential for a broad range of production on lower class soils.
“The proposal would … contribute to the ongoing reduction of land available for primary agricultural production,” she states, noting it doesn’t explain how the proposed processing uses will strengthen ties with producers.
“The commission believes the fundamental policy question remains unanswered by this proposal: How does allowing facilities that may source up to 95% of their inputs from outside British Columbia and Canada materially help British Columbia farmers grow more food?”
The BC Agriculture Council (BCAC), Small-Scale Meat Producers Association (SSMPA) and other farm organizations have also voiced opposition to a lower threshold.
“The 5% threshold doesn’t hold,” says BCAC executive director Danielle Synotte. “Dropping the BC content from 50% to 5% does not meaningfully tie new processing to BC agriculture or the land; in fact, it opens the ALR land to industrial development and potentially attracts the wrong kind of investment.”
Given that both the province’s Look West economic strategy and the federal government’s national food security strategy prioritize local production and purchasing, Synotte says any reduction in local sourcing requirements is counterproductive.
“It feels like it’s working against the objectives that both Mark Carney and Premier Eby have been talking about, building from within,” she says. “Some processors in BC [could] actually increase the reliance on products being sourced from the US or other competitors, at a time when both the public and governments are calling for less reliance on inputs sourced from outside Canada. It’s making us and our members scratch our heads.”
SSMPA notes that eliminating the need for processors to source local product will do nothing to increase processing capacity for livestock producers, who must book processing time months in advance.
“[It] puts small and medium BC farms in direct competition with much larger extra-provincial suppliers for the very processing capacity the change is meant to create for them,” SSMPA says in its submission to Popham.
Some of BCAC’s member organizations have also noted the potential biosecurity risks associated with large processors locating in agricultural areas and importing raw product from outside the country.
“Up to 95% of the product moving through those facilities could be imported,” Synotte notes. “In theory, more imported produce moving through facilities sited directly on or beside agricultural land increases the risk of introducing more foreign pests and disease into BC’s farming regions at exactly the sites where an outbreak would do the most damage to primary production.”
Popham, for her part, sees opportunities for the rule change to give hazelnut growers a market by allowing, say, a chocolate factory to set up within the ALR.
“[Hazelnuts] wouldn’t be their main ingredient – but they would use BC dairy, they would use BC hazelnuts,” she said. “It literally could take all the hazelnuts that they grow.”
But critics of the rule say the one thing the proposed rule change will do, if adopted, is increase development of farmland. The province says land available for processors will be limited to 5.2 million acres, but BCAC doesn’t agree.
“The new rule, even with this cap, carries the significant potential to chill the investment climate for new entrants and existing producers who may have otherwise expanded their operations as increased competition for ALR lands from entities with greater access to financing opportunities risks raising prices beyond what farmers and ranchers can realistically afford,” it says in its submission.
During a roundtable at the Union of BC Municipalities convention on September 18, Premier David Eby showed little concern.
“We felt like the whole conversation around land prices, speculation … fell on deaf ears,” she says.
BCAC’s recent Farming at the Edge report, which examined the barriers to farm growth, found that farmland appreciated at nearly four times the rate of farm income, underscoring the capital pressures farms face.
While food processors might feel like they can’t compete with logistics companies in the Lower Mainland’s industrial market – despite the fact access to land has never been among their top concerns – it isn’t fair to shift the risk onto farmers, who are typically price takers in the market.
“Processors are feeling like they can’t actually compete with the Amazons,” Synotte says. “This will just be shifted from their industry to ours, and farmers will have to compete with food manufacturers. … They’re talking about companies like McCain’s. How can a farmer compete with a McCain’s?”
Richmond farmer Harold Steves, who led establishment of the Agricultural Land Reserve in 1973, agrees.
“The 95% non-local processing will not help bona fide farmers, but it will help those landowners that want to develop their land,” he says. “It will increase the price bona fide farmers have to pay for land. It will use up valuable farmland when we need more farmland in production to grow more local food, which would warrant more local processing.”
He notes that some of the most lucrative crops in Richmond – blueberries and cranberries – are grown in the Class 4 soils the province wants to open up to processors. Yet thanks to the growth of these crops, multiple processors now handle the fruit in the Lower Mainland.
The BC Ministry of Agriculture and Food reports that it received about 250 submissions when the comment period ended September 18.
But it won’t be Popham who decides the fate of the proposal, however.
The government was dissolved four days later and an election called. The day before the writ dropped, Popham announced that she would not seek re-election.
Yet the proposal is not dead.
Delta South MLA and long-time agriculture critic Ian Paton has supported more flexible rules for processors, underscoring broad-based interest across the political spectrum in opening the ALR.
Joan Sawicki, who worked at the ALC in its early days, says business interests have always looked longingly at the ALR, and even if the current proposal is rejected, some others will follow.
“These lobbies to get access to cheap farmland were one of the circumstances that brought the ALR in in the first place,” she says. “The pressure to erode the scarce amount of farmland we have, that farmers rely on to grow the food that feeds us, is non-ending.”
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