Hamilton, Halton studies: Speculators and climate threaten food security

CATCH News – September 6 2010 — A study warning that farming is disappearing in the Halton area mirrors earlier findings in Hamilton on the impact of urbanization and speculation by land developers. It comes in a summer that has seen global food baskets battered by climatic extremes that have dramatically increased wheat prices.
Statistics from the 2006 census presented to Halton councillors this summer show that over half that region’s farmland is rented, and the number of farms in Halton fell by ten percent between 1996 and 2001, and by another ten percent in the 2001-2006 period.
“The rate of rental land is quite high in the GTA and it’s highest in Peel and Halton. The cost of land is prohibitive,” said Margaret Walton of Planscape consultants. “A tremendous amount of land is held in the GTA for speculation and it’s put into farming to qualify for the agricultural tax rate.”
An editorial in Canadian Champion argued the Halton data is another indication that farming in the Greater Toronto Area is a “dying profession” and suggested that locally grown food may soon be just a memory. It noted that that the average age of farmers in Halton is now over 55 and speculation has made farmland prohibitively expensive.
In a similar study released early last year, Walton found farm acreage in Hamilton fell by 5674 acres between 2001 and 2006, with over 3200 of those disappearing in Glanbrook where development pressure is particularly high. Farm earnings fell an inflation-adjusted 11 percent in that period and the number of farms declined to 975 – down 51 in the five-year period.
“What the statistics reveal is that since 1971, farmland area has decreased by 17% in the province; 6% in the southern Ontario region; and 22% in Hamilton,” noted the Planscape report.
About 43 percent of Hamilton’s farmland is rented, with the proportion lowest in Flamborough/Dundas at 33% and highest in Stoney Creek/Hamilton at 56% and Glanbrook at 57%, Walton’s report suggested the latter statistic “may be attributable to the activity associated with the airport and the industrial park and planning policies for the area.”
The impact on food security of the proposed 2050 acre aerotropolis may be better known later this month when city staff respond to questions raised in June by Brian McHattie who asked if the economic development and planning department is “confident from a planning perspective that we have enough farmland to feed Hamiltonians and folks in the GTA into the future.”
That question gained urgency through the summer as extreme weather battered global breadbaskets and pushed wheat prices up 70 percent by mid-August. Flooding in Saskatchewan cut their harvest by 15 percent, while an extreme heat wave in Russia knocked the world’s third largest grain producer entirely out of the global market.
At the same time, a catastrophic monsoon, that included 12 inches of rain in one 36-hour period, drove 20 million Pakistanis from their homes and put an area twice the size of Lake Superior under water. Pakistan is normally Asia’s third largest wheat producer and the rains especially threaten next year’s crop.
Major flooding in China and continuing drought in Australia also cut into the world’s granary this year. Lester Brown, recognized as perhaps the world’s leading authority on food security, warned that things could have been much worse if the Russian weather had hit more productive foodlands.
“If that heat wave had been centered in Chicago, we would have lost at least 150 million tons of grain, maybe 200 million tons of grain,” calculates Brown. “If the temperature of Chicago had been 14 degrees above normal during July, there would be chaos in world grain markets.”
Brown told Foreign Policy magazine that imposing Moscow’s extreme weather on the North China Plain which produces half that country’s wheat and a third of its corn would have also produced a global grain crisis.