Is the federal Farm Credit Corporation’s land-holding arm a replica of Saskatchewan’s controversial and now defunct government land bank?
Absolutely, positively not, says federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale.
“The intention is fundamentally different,” he said in an interview. “FCC acquired its holdings absolutely involuntarily. It did not set out to create government ownership of farmland.”
The federal lending agency accumulated land in the late 1980s, as did private lending institutions, because of a disastrous farm economy. It now is trying to sell that land “as rapidly as reasonably possible.”
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“I was always critical of the land bank in Saskatchewan,” added the veteran of the provincial Liberal party and its anti-land bank campaigns.
Still, like the land bank before it, the FCC has owned vast tracts of land through the past decade.
In the early 1990s, the corporation owned more than 1.3 million acres of farmland nation-wide, including 1.2 million acres in Saskatchewan. That is as much as the land bank ever owned.
This has raised for the FCC some of the same land management and disposal issues that faced the land bank.
However, there are obvious differences. The land bank was much more a tool of public policy for the provincial government than the FCC land division is for Ottawa.
Goodale said each farmer must decide whether to buy or rent land but he has no hesitation in arguing land ownership is better than renting.
The land bank was a well-intentioned failure, he says. “It probably created more problems than it solved.”
Don Kelsey, Saskatchewan co-ordinator for the National Farmers Union, said the land bank was in part a victim of its own popularity. The demand for land far outstripped the supply.
The 1991 federal census indicated about 40 percent of Prairie farmland was rented. Kelsey thinks that number will “probably increase” because of the high cost of land relative to rental costs.
Gilbert Wesson, fired as chair of the Lank Bank Commission in 1982 by the Tory government, said it was killed by ideology rather than economics.
“I think it was one of the best programs there has ever been for young farmers,” said Wesson.
Still, he figures that even though the need for a land bank is as great as ever, no government will ever try to resurrect it.
