The demonstration was organized by the NFU Youth Caucus and Farm Workers’ Working Group. The goal was to demand protection of food sovereignty and help farmers, especially young ones, gain more access to farmland.

Why it matters: Investor ownership represents a major barrier for Canadians to enter a shrinking agriculture industry.

NFU Youth president Jessie MacInnis said young farmers in particular have been feeling the strain of a lack of access to affordable farmland.

“As young people, this is a really critical issue,” MacInnis said. “There are already so many barriers for young people to get into agriculture, and the fact that land prices have risen so much due to the speculative nature of farmland now… that’s a barrier that’s hard for all of us to overcome.”

The demonstration was part of the NFU’s “Lobby Day” ahead of its annual convention, running Nov. 23-25 in Ottawa.

“We’re here today, as one of our lobby asks, to ask the federal government to have discussions with provincial lawmakers to talk about ways that we can actually ban all farmland investment,” she said.

“Essentially, we just want to keep the farmland in the hands of farmers and keep it accessible for young people.”

Ontario farmer Rav Singh said she has had trouble finding land since she began farming two years ago.

“I cannot afford to buy my own land because, again, land prices are increasing.

“We are the next generation of farmers and we are facing a lot of land speculation, the cost of land is rising, which means it is harder for us to start our farms and operate and have job security,” Singh said.

“It’s really important for me to support causes like this, because I would like to continue growing food for as long as I can.”

Singh did not come from a farming background, and lived in the city her whole life before she began farming.

“Up until recently, a lot of people who were farmers were intergenerational farmers. But now, it’s a new wave of people coming in.”

Singh said she thought the wave of young people getting into farming was a way of taking action to build a better future amid concerns about climate change.

Regional board member and Fraser Valley, B.C. organic vegetable farmer Ari Westhaver
said the Agricultural Land Reserve, a provincial designation in B.C. which designates agriculture as the primary use of 4.6 million hectares of land has not done enough to prevent the loss of farmland.

“It’s not preventing investors from buying up farmland,” Westhaver said. “So, while physically it protects farmland from being lost, it does not prevent loss of farmland from farmers into the hands of investors.

“The reason I’m here today as a young farmer is that we’re currently in the midst of a transition crisis, we’re seeing a generational shift where 40 per cent of farmers in … Canada are planning to retire in the next few years, but nobody has a transition plan,” he said.

“The only plan that they have, as deeply indebted farmers is to sell their land for a profit, and the reason they’re able to do so is farmland has been kind of divorced from its productive value, and it’s now something people speculate on.”

The NFU published an open letter ahead of the demonstration outlining its concerns.

“Farmers have the right to determine how their food is produced and need equitable access to productive resources,” the letter read. “Young farmers are up for the challenge. But land speculators and multinational investors are snatching up Canada’s farmland, and with it, our future.”

— Jonah Grignon reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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David Derwin of PI Financial in Winnipeg spoke of when canola prices were falling, and they broke through that psychological barrier of $800 per tonne on their way down.

“That was the key area of support. That would be a natural place for these prices to migrate back to,” Derwin said, pointing at old- and new-crop contracts.

“That would be a magnet to pull prices back up to those levels,” he added.

The current upswing in canola has largely been due to speculative funds looking to get out of enormous short positions they’ve built. Added to that, Derwin said there have been other factors influencing gains in the Canadian oilseed.

“We are entering what sometimes is a bit of a seasonally upward movement, he explained, noting this could last through April to June. Also, there’s been support from gains in the Chicago soy complex, European rapeseed and Malaysian palm oil.

“There’s room for these [canola] markets to move another $50 per tonne,” Derwin suggested.

He cautioned the overall trend is still to drift lower, but with fluctuations going up and down.

That said, he added, this is a good time for farmers to take advantage of canola prices and not to be complacent — and that farmers should add additional hedges and make more new-crop physical sales.

“The bottom line of it, is the risk is always to the downside for the farmers,” Derwin said.

— Glen Hallick reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.

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“This has been a brutal drop in canola,” said Bruce Burnett, director of markets and weather with MarketsFarm.

“We have a lot of money playing around in canola right now,” he added, noting much of the latest weakness was tied to speculators adding to short positions.

The latest Commitment of Traders data, as of Feb. 28, showed fund traders already heavily short at that time, with open interest rising to record levels over the past two weeks as canola futures lost roughly $75 per tonne.

“The funds are looking for things they think are overvalued, and they’ve determined that canola is overvalued,” Burnett said.

However, he noted, canola futures are now trading at a discount to Chicago soybeans, which would imply canola should be due for a correction as the Canadian oilseed typically trades at a premium.

From a chart standpoint, the May contract fell below several key support points during the latest selloff with the relative strength index showing a heavily oversold market.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin is an associate editor/analyst with MarketsFarm in Winnipeg.

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Lawmakers debated whether to change Section 25 of the constitution to enable authorities to seize land to address racial land inequalities left over from colonialism and white minority rule.

Redressing them has been a flagship promise of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) but little progress has been made on it nearly three decades since the end of apartheid.

“Today we stand to complete the fight against the original sin of land dispossession,” the amendment’s main champion, Justice Minister Roland Lamola, said in a speech in parliament.

He said the state was targeting land only under special conditions such as it having longtime informal occupants, being unused and held purely for speculation, or being abandoned.

But it was rejected by the ANC’s opponents on both sides of the spectrum. The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) and right-wing Freedom Front Plus view the plan as an assault on property rights, while the radical Marxist EFF — which also voted against — wants the state to take control of the land.

In all, 204 lawmakers backed the amendment and 145 voted against, with no abstentions.

In the early 20th century, South Africa’s British imperial rulers gave the lion’s share of farmland to whites, mostly to the Afrikaners, descendants of generations of Dutch settlers who make up most white farmers today.

They left just seven per cent for “natives,” meaning Blacks, aboriginal Khoisan and “coloureds” — Afrikaans-speaking South Africans of mixed multiracial heritage.

Then in 1950, the Afrikaner National Party passed a law limiting movements of non-whites, kicking 3.5 million Blacks off their ancestral homelands and putting them in townships.

Twenty seven years of Black majority rule has barely shifted this apartheid geography, despite Nelson Mandela’s pledge after taking power in 1994 to return 30 per cent of land in five years.

“This bill…does nothing to help landless South Africans who have been let down by the ANC’s failing land reform,” the DA’s land committee chairperson Annelie Lotriet said.

Nearly 26 million hectares — three quarters — of privately-owned land is still in the hands of whites, who make up less than a 10th of the population of 58 million, while only four per cent is owned by Blacks who are nearly 80 per cent, government data shows.

The government has tried to persuade whites to sell their land under a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ policy, but found hardly any willing sellers. A 2016 parliamentary study found the programme had transferred just 5.46 per cent of farmland to Black individuals, trusts and state institutions in two decades.

— Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent for southern Africa in Johannesburg.

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