Agricultural Land Reserve loses 632 hectares in 2007, the third year of reductions since 2003

Derek Penner, Vancouver Sun - Published: Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Original article
British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve experienced its biggest net loss of land in the last 10 years in 2007, with property carved off to satisfy needs for industrial developments in the north and desires for resort and residential subdivisions in the south.

The B.C. Agricultural Land Commission, according to its annual report, approved applications to take 1,220 hectares of farmland out of the 4.76-million-hectare reserve but only approved the addition of 588 hectares of non-farmland, leaving a net loss of 632 hectares.

It was the third year in the last five that the commission approved net reductions in the province’s protected farm base, eroding the last big addition made to the ALR in 1999.

The commission, in its report, said it reviewed 666 applications in 2007, the highest number in the last five years, during which the trend of declining requests for exclusion, addition or subdivision of farmland reversed itself.

Colin Fry, executive director of the Agricultural Land Commission, said applications to the commission declined steadily from 1990 to 2003, which saw just 463 applications.

The biggest areas of exclusion were in the northern region, where the commission allowed the removal of 543 hectares, the Okanagan, where 287 hectares were allowed out, and the Kootenays which saw 287 hectares taken out of the reserve.

The land commission’s south-coast region, which includes the fertile Fraser Valley, allowed 73 hectares to be removed from the reserve, with 71 hectares classified as having “prime” agricultural capability.

However, Fry said about 40 hectares of the land removed were from an application to take the Chilliwack landfill out of the reserve.

Fry added that the landfill predated the ALR’s creation in 1973, and had already been debilitated as farm land, regardless of what capabilities it had before that.

“The vast majority of exclusions were looked as being, once the commission looked at them, land that had limited or no agricultural capability,” Fry said in an interview.

That is not to say the ALR faces pressure from growth.

Fry said the Fraser Valley’s population has grown and the infrastructure needed to support that population has been expanded.

“There is an urban, agricultural boundary,” Fry added, “and yes, there is often pressure to look at agricultural land as an opportunity to relieve some of these [growth pressures].”

“That’s where the commission has an obligation to be a custodian of that border and of the land uses within the ALR.”

However, critics of the land commission maintain that it hasn’t done enough to protect agricultural land.

“The fact we’re still losing farm land from some of the prime areas is really unacceptable,” said Dave Sands, a member of the ALR Protection and Enhancement committee, a farming-advocacy group and a retired provincial ministry of agriculture regional director, in an interview.

“The vision has to be first, ‘how do we feed ourselves,’” Sands said, “but that’s not what we’re doing.”

“We’re saying ‘how do we handle transportation, how do we build new houses,’ and they put that secondly the fact we have to eat.”

depenner@vancouversun.com