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Investor ownership or social investment? Changing farmland ownership in Saskatchewan, Canada

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Who in the very near future will end up owning Saskatchewan farm lands? The farmer and the family farm unit, or the big land owner and the commercial corporation, either foreign or domestic? (Kowalchuk 1973, p. 3083).

Abstract

There is growing recognition that land grabbing is a global phenomenon. In Canada, investors are particularly interested in Saskatchewan farmland, the province where 40 % of country’s agricultural land is situated. This article examines how the changing political, economic, and legal context under neoliberalism has shaped patterns of farmland ownership in Saskatchewan, between 2002 and 2014. Our research indicates that over this time, the amount of farmland owned by investors increased 16-fold. Also, the concentration of farmland ownership is on the rise, with the share of farmland owned by the largest four private owners increasing six-fold. Our methodology addresses some of the criticisms raised in the land grabbing literature. By using land titles data, we identified farmland investors and determined very precisely their landholdings thus allowing us to provide a fine-grained analysis of the actual patterns of farmland ownership. Although the article analyzes changes to farmland ownership in a specific historical, cultural and legislative context, it serves as the basis for a broader discussion of the values and priorities that land ownership policies reflect. Namely, we contrast an ‘open for business’ approach that prioritizes financial investment to one based on a land sovereignty approach that prioritizes social investment. The latter has greater potential if the aim is ecological sustainability and food sovereignty.

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Fig. 1

Credits: Map prepared by Sarina Gersher using ArcGIS and source map data from Information Services Corporation (Including Sask Grid, Rural Municipalities Boundary Overlay, Sask Surface Cadastral, and Ownership Datasets). Source map data utilized and reproduced with the permission of Information Services Corporation. Additional GIS data from Natural Resources Canada and GeoBase. (Color figure online)

Fig. 2

Credits: Map prepared by Sarina Gersher using ArcGIS and source map data from Information Services Corporation (Including Sask Grid, Rural Municipalities Boundary Overlay, Sask Surface Cadastral, and Ownership Datasets). Source map data utilized and reproduced with the permission of Information Services Corporation. Additional GIS data from Natural Resources Canada and GeoBase. (Color figure online)

Fig. 3

Credits: Map prepared by Sarina Gersher using ArcGIS and source map data from Information Services Corporation (Including Sask Grid, Rural Municipalities Boundary Overlay, Sask Surface Cadastral, and Ownership Datasets). Additional data provided from the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency (SAMA), by contract. Source map data utilized and reproduced with the permission of Information Services Corporation. Additional GIS data from Natural Resources Canada and GeoBase

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Notes

  1. The Crow's Nest Pass Agreement and its attendant freight rate (most commonly referred to as the Crow Rate) was a historical agreement between the federal government of Canada and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). It provided the railway company with concessions and benefits while also requiring it to reduce transportation costs for farmers shipping grain from the prairies provinces to other domestic and export markets.

  2. For a detailed analysis of structural adjustment of the Canadian agricultural sector see Qualman and Wiebe (2002).

  3. While our discussion integrates the recent literature, it is important to highlight here the earlier work of some key authors that we have not yet mentioned. Especially noteworthy is the political economy analysis of large-scale land deals in the double special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies introduced by White et al. (2012). Safransky and Wolford (2011), meanwhile, shed light on the main mechanisms of accumulation that facilitate a creeping expansion of land investment in many parts of the world.

  4. See the Journal of Peasant Studies (2013) special issue on land grabbing methodology for discussions of a number of methodological issues that need to be addressed.

  5. The Saskatchewan Farm Ownership Act of 1974 was amended several times and replaced by the Saskatchewan Farm Security Act in 1988. Subsequently, the latter was amended by The Saskatchewan Farm Security Amendment Act that was passed in July 2002 and took effect in January 2003. It is, however, generally called The Saskatchewan Farm Security Act.

  6. The Saskatchewan Land Bank Commission was disbanded in 1982 by The Land Bank Repeal and Temporary Provisions Act that took effect in 1983.

  7. Others have different explanations of this policy shift. For example, Ferguson et al. (2006) use an economic argument claiming that poor economic returns from agriculture in the early 2000s led to a situation in which there were more farmland sellers than buyers. According to this argument, farmers generally supported lifting the ownership restrictions in 2002 in order to prop up the price of farmland (Ferguson et al. 2006, p. 62). A similar argument, pointed out by one of the reviewers of this article, is that retiring farmers may stand to benefit from having more potential buyers for their land. While these arguments are plausible, we contend that a more complete explanation must acknowledge the broader restructuring of agriculture occurring on the prairies at the time.

  8. The public narrative used to help justify this shift in policy related to an impending legal case brought by an individual against the Government of Saskatchewan. A resident of British Columbia wanted to purchase land in Saskatchewan and threatened to file a court case against the Government of Saskatchewan for not allowing him to do so (Pratt 2015). He argued that Saskatchewan law was violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, namely his rights to mobility (Briere 2002; Patterson 2014a). While it may be that the Government of Saskatchewan feared losing a court battle, other provinces had restrictions on purchases of farmland by non-residents (i.e. Prince Edward Island and Québec).

  9. The Treaty Land Entitlement process is intended to settle land debts owed to Canadian First Nations who did not receive all the land they were entitled to under treaties signed by the Crown. Treaty Land Entitlement agreements are negotiated among First Nations, Canada’s federal government, and provincial and territorial governments. Crown land is transferred and/or money is provided so that a First Nation can purchase federal, provincial or territorial, or private land to settle the land debt.

  10. The Hutterian Brethren, or Hutterites, belong to an Anabaptist sect and operate large communal, collectively owned farms.

  11. Estimates of total area of privately owwned farmland in the province range from 57.95 million acres, according to data provided by request from the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency (SAMA) and their database which lists taxable agricultural land, to 61.63 million acres from Statistics Canada and their Census of Agriculture (Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 004-0204). The two values differ by 6.3 percent. This article uses the lower number, from SAMA, because the authors believe that it is more likely to reflect the actual acreage of privately owned farmland in the province.

  12. In order to determine the reliability of the coding used by the Farmland Security Board to distinguish between “arms length” and “family transactions”, we conducted a statistical analysis. Based on a random sample of all the “arms length” records, we found that 5.6 % of the records did not represent market transactions between distinct entities (0.9 % were improperly coded, 3.6 % were asset transfers between related entities, and 1.1 % were annexations by a government agency). We can say with 99 % confidence that 94.4 ± 0.27 % of the transactions coded as “arms length” were in fact market transactions between distinct entities. We calculated the acreage of arms length transactions as follows: Sum of all transactions coded as “arms length” (22,135,780 acres) × 0.944 = 20,896,108 acres.

  13. Investors own 1.44 % of Saskatchewan farmland, representing 3.8 % of the farmland sold in arms-length transactions over the last 12 years. Thus, for every percentage point in the rate of investor ownership, investors purchased 2.77 % of the land sold in arms-length transactions (3.8/1.44 = 2.64). A 5 % rate of investor ownership would thus translate into 13 % of the land sold in arms-length transactions, and an 8 % rate of ownership into 21 % of the land sold in arms length transactions.

  14. Given that the new legislation has yet to be introduced, it is too early to know precisely what form the restrictions will take.

Abbreviations

CANSIM:

Canadian Socio-Economic Information Management system

CLO:

Concentration of Land Ownership by the 4 largest owners

CPPIB:

Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board

CR4:

Concentration ratio of the largest 4 firms

CUSTA:

Canada–US Trade Agreement

GIS:

Geographic Information Systems

ISC:

Information Services Corporation

LP:

Limited Partnership

NAFTA:

North American Free Trade Agreement

NFU:

National Farmers Union

RM:

Rural Municipalities

SAMA:

Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency

WTO:

World Trade Organization

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible with funding from the Canada Research Chairs program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and the University of Manitoba. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by Sarina Gersher who provided much needed GIS expertise and developed the maps. We are especially grateful of the support provided by Dr. Geoff Cunfer and his Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. All maps were prepared using GIS data provided by Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan. We are grateful to the University of Manitoba’s legal department for their work in drafting a legal agreement with Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan for use of their title-holder dataset. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the National Farmers Union. Without the cooperation of farm families and their democratic organizations, research such as ours would be much more difficult. Finally, we would like to thank four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba, 320 Isbister, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada

    Annette Aurélie Desmarais

  2. Box 84, Dundurn, SK, SOD 1K0, Canada

    Darrin Qualman

  3. Department of Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, Regina, SK, S4S 0A2, Canada

    André Magnan

  4. St. Andrews College, University of Saskatchewan, Box 89, Delisle, SK, S0L 0P0, Canada

    Nettie Wiebe

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  1. Annette Aurélie Desmarais
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Desmarais, A.A., Qualman, D., Magnan, A. et al. Investor ownership or social investment? Changing farmland ownership in Saskatchewan, Canada. Agric Hum Values 34, 149–166 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9704-5

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