Re: land investment pools in your Jan. 27 issue, this … is becoming more and more important as a large portion of our active farmers are reaching retirement age. In the next few years a historically large amount of land will be coming up for sale and the investment funds are positioning themselves to take advantage of this.
According to your article, these investment companies are getting money from a variety of investors including foreign countries such as China and Saudi Arabia.
We need to be thinking about what direction that this will take us. In the 1970s there was a huge uproar about the government buying land and renting it back to farmers in the form of the Land Bank.
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It was said that the government was competing against other farmers for the land and that no good could come from the government being in control of our country’s food growing acres.
Yet now, as we see corporate and foreign interests buying up the same land, there is very little being said.
As immigrants, our ancestors came to this country to gain the chance to be landowners. In some of the old countries, the only way you could ever own land and be financially secure was to be born into it.
Young farmers in the Prairies are now competing for land against the pocketbooks of wealthy investment funds and, in some cases, the treasuries of some of the richest countries in the world. Farm debt is at record levels.
How long until we are all just sharecroppers and tenants the way farmers were 200 years ago? If you say it’s a long way off, you aren’t looking at the facts.
Brent Johnson,Strasbourg, Sask.
