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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 climactic 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 10 per cent between 1996 and 2001, and by another 10 per cent 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.”
Halton media called the data 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. The average age of farmers in Halton is now over 55 and farmland is prohibitively expensive.
In a similar study released early last year, Walton found Hamilton farmland fell by 5674 acres between 2001 and 2006. Farm earnings fell an inflation–adjusted 11 per cent in that period, and 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 per cent in the province; 6 per cent in the southern Ontario region; and 22 per cent in Hamilton,” noted the Planscape report.
About 43 per cent of Hamilton’s farmland is rented, with the proportion lowest in Flamborough/Dundas at 33 per cent and highest in Stoney Creek/Hamilton at 56 per cent and Glanbrook at 57 per cent. 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 this month when city staff respond to questions raised in June by Brian McHattie. He 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 this summer as extreme weather battered global breadbaskets and pushed wheat prices up 70 per cent by mid–August. Flooding in Saskatchewan cut their harvest by 15 per cent, 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, which 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.
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. V
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