Delta South MLA Vicki Huntington revealed Tuesday that an industrial consortium is behind the optioning of 558 acres (226 hectares) of South Delta farmland for port-related use.
Huntington's office has uncovered $98 million in options on prime ALR farmland located in the area around Highway 17 and Deltaport Way.
"Port-related corporations like CN Rail, CP Rail and Western Stevedoring are working with developers who are actively seeking prime land in the Agricultural Land Reserve," says Huntington.
"The potential loss is even greater than the 512 acres (207 hectares) of ALR lost to the Tsawwassen treaty. The combined loss could reach over 1,000 acres. The targeted land is some of the best agricultural soil in Canada and represents a critically productive mass in Delta."
Huntington says the options favour Lamington Heights Investments. The firm is closely connected to the Emerson Real Estate Group, which specializes in confidential industrial land acquisition.
She says documents show that option-to-purchase agreements have been signed on 11 productive farm parcels. The parcels are adjacent to lands previously purchased in 2009 by B.C. Rail under its mandate to acquire port-related lands.
Huntington says it appears the developers eventually hope to acquire all Delta lands in the agricultural triangle between Highway 17 and Deltaport Way. The land abuts the Tsawwassen First Nation property that is now slated for industrial and commercial development. According to sources, initial plans already exist for an intermodal yard and logistics park.
The B.C. Gateway Transportation Strategy released earlier this week specifically supports private sector investments in new "transload" and integrated logistics facilities, along with $2-billion in "improvements to the proposed Roberts Bank Terminal 2." The provincial government's Pacific Gateway and B.C. Ports strategies also include the mandate to acquire land for strategic port-related industry, Huntington says.
"The province is completely complicit in this effort to industrialize the ALR."
"The proposed Gulf Rail Yard has morphed into a full scale intermodal and logistics centre, complete with rubber-tired gantry cranes moving containers from road to rail and vice versa; state of the art distribution warehouses; container storage operations; and a probable free trade zone that a port operator is presently pursuing with the federal government," she says.
"This is the industrialization of agriculture on a grand scale," says Huntington. "This is big money, big business and big government. There is no doubt these plans would greatly increase port capacity and efficiency. And in other circumstances the development would be extremely exciting. But this is the wrong place and the wrong land."
Ironically, the optioned properties were part of the Roberts Bank back-up lands, farmland that was expropriated in 1968 for port development. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, the province sold the land back to farmers for an average of $10,000 per acre. A decade later, the land is being optioned at an average of $185,000 per acre. One family alone has accepted options totaling more than $44 million.
"Few people would turn down this kind of money, especially when it's clear the ALR means so little to our government," says Huntington. "It's disappointing, though, when even our pioneer farming families don't fight this destruction of farmland."
"This is government-supported land speculation that is destabilizing the farming industry in Delta. And it couldn't happen if our provincial government had the moral courage to declare the ALR off-limits. The ALR is not a strategic land bank for Port Metro Vancouver."
Just as worrisome, says Huntington, is the destabilizing impact on both the environment and food security.
"Without the upland forage that agricultural land provides, the ecosystem supporting the Pacific Migratory bird flyway will collapse," she says. "Not to mention the fact that B.C. already imports more than half the food consumed in this province.
"Industry has a habit of saying, 'We need to balance the economy and the environment.' But in the face of development in the Lower Mainland, Delta's agricultural land is all that's left to support the flyway. Delta is the balance."
"It never seems to end," Huntington says. "High voltage transmission lines; treaty lands excluded from the ALR; the third berth; new rail yards; Terminal 2; the South Fraser Perimeter Road; overpasses, underpasses, access roads and interchanges; and now intermodal yards and logistics parks.
"This government is sacrificing Delta - and our agricultural heritage - to oblige Gateway. At some point we have to say, 'This isn't going to happen.'"
