I joined with twelve other BC soil scientists to express our concerns about Bill 24 in an open letter to the Premier. This proposed legislation would radically weaken protection for farmland, especially in the southeastern, central and northern interior. It would create regional inequities, undermine science-based land use planning, and foreclose options that the Agricultural Land Reserve has kept open since 1973.
As we pointed out, the zone proposed for weaker protection actually includes 85 per cent of BC's best (classes 1 to 4) agricultural lands, so residents of northern BC need to be particularly concerned.
It's unfortunate timing that this backward step came simultaneously with release of the latest draft report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which flagged food security for special attention. As always, the IPCC uses careful language, but their concern is unmistakable: "Each additional decade of climate change is expected to reduce mean yields by roughly one per cent, which is a small but nontrivial fraction of the anticipated roughly 14 per cent increase in productivity per decade needed to keep pace with demand" (page 22).
That's a huge potential shortfall, and since BC is currently a net food importer, we need to become less vulnerable to unstable global markets. One of the few areas of hope in the IPCC's prognosis is that warmer conditions may allow some northward expansion of cropping into areas previously limited by temperature (page 30). So this is exactly the wrong time to jeopardize one of our best tools for adaptation: a widely distributed bank of northern agricultural land.
Northern consumers are already voting with their food dollars to support local agriculture: expenditures at farmers' markets from Terrace to Quesnel grew by more than 60 per cent between 2006 and 2012. But all levels of government need to support - not undermine - this healthy trend. A concrete, positive step would be to re-establish the agricultural research station at Prince George that was shut down two decades ago.
Instead of proceeding with Bill 24, our MLAs need to hold travelling hearings to find out how producers, consumers and governments can work together to make the most of our land resources. By world standards, we're fortunate to have a relatively small population, so with careful planning, our precious endowment of productive farmlands, with their diversity of soils and microclimates, can remain one of our best hopes for meeting the climate change challenge.
Paul Sanborn
Prince George
