The Dominion - agriculture

Bye, Bye, Wheat Board?

Tim McSorley — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:27:59 +0000

Small farmers raise concern as Conservatives prepare to cut board's monopoly

WINNIPEG—Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is preparing to pass legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly on exports and milling of prairie-grown wheat and barley.

“The Wheat Board was brought into place, basically, so that grain buyers wouldn’t take advantage of farmers,” explained Jo-Lene Gardiner of Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives, which is based out of Pilot Mound, MB.

From it's offices in Winnipeg, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) markets Canadian grain to world markets and for domestic consumption.

Opinions among grain farmers are divided on the issue. As it stands, grain farmers in western Canada can only sell wheat and barley to the CWB. The Wheat Board therefore decides which varieties of wheat and barley farmers can grow, buys grain from farmers and markets it to buyers domestically and around the world.

One benefit to farmers under the current system is that payment of grain is meted out over a year period, and the CWB attempts to provide farmers with the best price possible for their grain by paying them the average price of grain on the world market over the year.

“If when you sell your wheat, [the] price is five dollars a bushel, and by the time the end of the year came along the price was nine dollars a bushel, under the new system you’re stuck with five dollars, end of story,” said Jan McIntyre, a mixed cattle and grain farmer near Cartwright, MB. “Under the Wheat Board, you would get the average price, which would be the difference between your five dollars and whatever the final average was.”

Currently, the CWB provides all grain farmers with the same price for their grain, "no matter if you have 100 bushels or 100,000,” said Gardiner. “If you have No. 1 wheat at 14 per cent protein, you would get the same price [per bushel] as the next guy. Everybody is treated equally under the system.”

“[The Wheat Board] takes a certain percentage [of wheat] right off the combine right to their elevator,” Derek Marvin told The Dominion. Marvin is a 31-year-old elementary school teacher in Winnipeg, but during the summer months leading up to harvest, he returns to his family’s farm in the rural municipality of Elton, MB, to help his father run their 2,300-acre operation.

“Without it, farmers are going to have to bring it back home in their own storage bins on the farm, and so you’re going to have to buy new bins and find more storage and find more space for it all," he said. "A grain bin holds 40,000 bushels, and that’ll cost you $100,000. That’s like buying a house!”

Opponents of the CWB’s monopoly argue that farmers ought to have the right to market their own grain, and decide which varieties to grow and when.

“An open market will increase the number of buyers bidding on our wheat and barley,” federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said told reporters in October, according to the Globe & Mail. “Unlike what some people may claim, the sky will not fall in an open market. Instead, the sky will be the limit.”

“I think it’s going to be a positive change,” said Barry Critcher, who has been farming grain for 28 years. Critcher farms 3,200 acres between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, BC, one of British Columbia’s most productive grain growing regions. “I think it’s going to be positive to my farm, because I can sell my grain to who I want, when I want, and I can do the things I want to do on my farm without having to worry about letting somebody else do the marketing for me."

The prairie provinces have been experiencing a rural demographic shift since at least the 1970s, which kicked into high gear since the 1980s. Rural populations are diminishing, small towns are dying, and economic control over food systems is held by an increasingly smaller number of players, with money flowing out of small communities and into corporate headquarters, such as those of agribusiness giants Vittera and Cargill, in urban centers.

How will the changes to the CWB affect this demographic and economic transition?

“I think it will perpetuate the problem,” said Marvin, whose family has been farming grain in Elton, MB area for three generations. “It’s already to the point where rarely can a small family farm exist on its own. It needs other income. When I think of all the farms around my community, all the farmers who were farming smaller acreages than us have dropped off. They’ve sold a few acres to us, a few to the Hutterites, a few to some other neighbors, because it’s just too tough to keep up.”

While it is impossible at this juncture to confidently predict what effects the changes to the Canadian Wheat Board will have on farmers and rural communities, there is no doubt that grain farmers and farming communities in western Canada will have to adapt to the new economic reality—and fast.

Most expect that the proposed legislation will go through; if it does, as of August 1, 2012, the Canadian Wheat Board as we know it today will be gone.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and musician living in Winnipeg.

Golden Wheat

Dressing Up

hillarybain — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:06:53 +0000

Kids shake it up in Halifax's North End

HALIFAX—Eleven-year-old Craig Cain eagerly shakes bottles of Hope Blooms salad dressing and pours them into dishes for a potential customer to taste. He tells the customer his favourite flavour is Creamy Dill and Garlic, and smiles widely when a purchase is made. It is 7:45 on a Saturday morning. At one point, when offered a $20 bill for a $6 bottle of salad dressing, he pauses and asks, without guile, “Do you need change for that?” He is eager. So eager, he happily got up two hours earlier that morning to volunteer to sell salad dressing.

Cain is one of almost 40 kids who work on a youth project at the North End Community Garden in Halifax, and who, with the help of sponsors and the program’s organizers, have started a registered charity and a business: Hope Blooms. The majority of the money from the business goes into a scholarship fund for the young people; the rest goes to a community charity.

“First we pick the stuff from the garden, then we take it in, then we clean it, then we spin it, then we cut it, then we put it in the blender with the other ingredients and then we pour it into the bottles.” Cain has been working in the garden for two years. He has learned how to grow plants and how to make salad dressing. He says it’s a lot of fun.

Eleven-year-old Karen Chen says she and her colleagues have to pay attention to how many vegetables they grow, and that relates to how much salad dressing they can make and sell. Each bottle of salad dressing contains a half-cup of herbs. “It’s a lot. We need a lot each time,” says Chen. “Some people just come to our garden and take our stuff and smash it. It’s bad. I think that each plant has its own life,” says Chen, “It makes us really, really angry.”

Vandalism of the garden is only one of the challenges the kids in the area are facing. “The community has its challenges, as do all marginalized communities, as it relates to crime and poverty,” says Cheyanne Gorman-Tolliver. Gorman-Tolliver works with the Black Business Institute (BBI), which is working closely with Hope Blooms. “But the people are strong and they make a way.”

“Sometimes we have to start over again [after the garden is vandalized],” says eight-year-old Folayemi Boboye. “We may have to make more compost and start growing again.” Boboye has a unique view on the garden: she says it is patient.

“I think it’s the kids who are patient,” counters Chen. “We have to have patience and help the garden.” They agree, however, that, like all of us, the garden needs to take time to grow. It needs someone to take good care of it.

Jillian Martin, who works at the North End Community Health Centre, has noticed a difference in the young people’s commitment to taking care of their garden and their business. Each year, their willingness to show up and work hard improves. “Now that they know what it’s all about,...as soon as they get there, they’re ready to work,” says Martin, who describes her role with the garden as a manager of operations.

She says it was a real learning process and that it took a long time to get the business started and on track. With help from the BBI, they came up with a business plan and learned about things such as a financial forecast—“terms we’d never heard of,” says Martin. The Centre for Women and Business at Mount Saint Vincent also provided a lot of assistance. “We’re good at using our resources and asking for help because we recognize that we don’t really know what we’re doing when it comes to business, but the spirit is there and the dream is there so we just have to kind of go with the flow. It’s not hard to keep going because there’s just so much inspiration and the kids love it.”

The kids also love the business camp BBI hosts each year. At the camp, the children learn important points of running a business. They learn “entrepreneurship...and the value of making a product, selling it, and feeling proud of yourself for doing your own thing” says Martin. Cain says he is learning how to count change, how to sell, and that sometimes it’s important to get up really early.

Cain wants to start his own line of salad dressing when he grows up. He wants to be a business man.

The program has the kids seriously considering their futures. “They actually take the time to think, ‘what do I want to be when I grow up, and how do I get there?’” says Martin. A few weeks ago, one young girl asked Martin what community college was about and whether she could use the money from the scholarships for college rather than university. Martin says, “They’ve been starting to ask [these kinds of] questions, realizing, 'I do have a prospect of education, I do have this money coming when I graduate, what should I do with it?'”

Jessie Jollymore, Martin’s colleague at the Health Centre, is the woman whose vision was to develop the garden. She says that when she has taken the young people to various events and presentations, she has them speak about their dreams for the future. The children talk about wanting to be teachers, doctors, marine biologists: at this point, says Jollymore, the room goes silent. She says people are surprised to hear that these kids from low-income, disadvantaged communities have dreams. “They shouldn’t be [surprised],” she says, “Everyone has dreams.”

Chen wants to be a chef when she grows up. “Getting people to eat nutritious food is the biggest challenge,” she says. “Some people don’t like vegetables and eat unhealthy things.” After displaying her knowledge of the various nutrients and vitamins found in fruits and vegetables, she continues, “I never really liked cucumbers, but after I started working in the garden I took a bite of cucumber and felt like I wanted to go outside and yell, ‘Delicious!’”

Boboye eats a lot of vegetables now too. She takes what she grows home to her mother. “My mom always makes some salads and they’re really good.” She says she has learned that it’s important to eat good, healthy food.

“The moms have really taken an interest,” says Martin. “I think they really enjoy coming to a place where they can see their kids flourishing.”

Last year, the youth shared their proceeds with ARK, a shelter for street-involved and homeless youths. “They’ve been developing a sense of making money, and giving it back to the community.” This year, they will choose another organization with whom to share their proceeds.

Chen says, “We’re helping a lot of people by selling what we make.”

“It means a lot to me to see positivity coming into the neighbourhood...the community gets a really negative rap sometimes from the media,” says Martin.

Jollymore says that the whole project is about the kids having a sense of empowerment regarding their futures. It’s also about spreading that sense of empowerment throughout the community. Cain wants to see more people from his school come to the garden and help out. “They don’t get paid to come here, they don’t get paid to make [the salad dressing],” says Martin, but they come anyway.

A greenhouse is in the process of being built so herbs for the salad dressing can be grown all winter long. It looks like the business will keep flourishing. So far, Hope Blooms has sold out every week they've set up shop at the market.

Charlene is a freelancer and a recent graduate of Journalism at King's. She holds a BA and MA in English literature. She works as a Junior Program Officer at Imhotep Legacy Academy.

Craig Cain

Greenhouse

Farmland Frontier

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:47:04 +0000

New wave of agricultural land-grabs reaches Canada

MONTREAL—In an age of escalating food insecurity and financial uncertainty, large corporations, investors, and even nations states have been stalking the globe in pursuit of an age-old and certain commodity: farmland. Bought up on a large scale to secure food for cropstarved countries or to make a safe investment, farmland is becoming the lucrative prize of a new resource frontier. The sweep of agricultural land grabs has stripped small farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia of control over vital tracts of fertile land. And quietly, these modern-day land marauders are coming to Canada—undermining family farms, compromising local food sovereignty, and harming the environment.

This past July the National Farmers Union (NFU) sounded the alarm. In a report entitled “Losing Our Grip: How a Corporate Farmland Buy-up, Rising Farm Debt, and Agribusiness Financing of Inputs Threaten Family Farms and Food Sovereignty,” the union documents how foreign ownership of farmland in Canada is no longer a theoretical fear. It’s happening.

Investor group Walton International is buying up farmland across Alberta and has now moved into Ontario, converting farmland into “development-ready property”—what critics say is a euphemism for development geared towards urban sprawl. According to its website, Walton “manages approximately 36,000 acres on behalf of over 35,000 investors worldwide.”

News has broken recently about Quebec-based Monaxxion, representing Chinese financiers, which seeks to purchase 99,000 acres of land across Canada. La Terre de chez nous, the publication of the Union des producteurs agricoles, the Quebec farm union, has reported that Monaxxion describes its clients as “high net worth investors”—one investor, according to the report, is looking to pick up $30 million in land, and another has a personal wealth of $2 billion.

And Agcapita, a Calgary-based investment fund, has scooped up between 30,000 and 60,000 acres of farmland, mostly in Saskatchewan. “I’m convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time,” US commodities guru and advisor to Agcapita Jim Rogers told Fortune
Magazine in 2009.

Kevin Wipf from NFU’s head office in Regina believes such sentiments are cause for grave concern.

“Farmland is food land and we believe protecting the family farm and protecting local food systems is vitally important,” Wipf said. “When you have foreign investors coming to purchase land solely for the sake of investing, you are losing the sovereignty over food land, those local food systems and control over your land base. And they won’t have the same concern for the environment and sustainability that we believe a local farmer would have.”

Devlin Kuyek is a researcher with GRAIN, an organization that supports the struggle of small farmers and social movements for community-controlled food systems and agricultural biodiversity. He has analyzed the global trends bearing down on Canada.

“These land grabs are happening on a large scale,” he said.

The overall numbers are staggering. GRAIN estimates that there is $100 billion sitting in global funds for the purchase or lease of farmlands. At least fifty million hectares of farmland has already been acquired.

“In 2008 the [food] prices skyrocketed and you had many countries who are quite dependent on food imports start looking at different ways to secure food,” Kuyek said.

The Gulf States, China, Japan, South Korea and most of Western Europe in particular have since been trying to increase their access to agricultural land in poorer countries.

“You also had the people in the financial sector start looking at farmland as a secondary assets class that they could invest [in] to give them returns that they weren’t seeing otherwise,” Kuyek said.

GRAIN identified 120 investment groups specifically set up to buy up farms. These include investment funds, investments from wealthy individuals and banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

“You have a bunch of apologists trying to frame this as some sort of agricultural modernization or some way to capture or harness private sector investment in agriculture,” he says. “There are larger forces that are bearing down, and Canada is definitely being targeted. People are not aware of what’s happening. Those looking to invest in farmland have access to millions of billions of dollars that they can mobilize rapidly and instantaneously.”

According to Wipf, such developments portend the demise of viable farming.

“The ability to produce food, the ability to have a local food system, is really what makes a community viable,” he said. “When you have foreign interests controlling a large part of an important resource like farmland—which is often not viewed as a resource—you lose your autonomy.”

The NFU believes a perfect storm of factors is undermining the family farm. Farms are burdened by a crushing debt—for each dollar earned, farmers are 23 dollars in debt. Under financial strain, farmers are forced to turn to agro-corporations that are increasingly financing farmers’ seeds, chemicals, and fertilizer—and farmers then return a share of their crop to the corporation.

Farmers who are in debt and bound by contracts to corporations are easily outbid by wealthy investors
who see farmland as a hot new commodity.

“We do know there are investors looking at Canadian farmland,” Kuyek said. “There are over 20 major investment funds that are being set up across the country. Some of them have been here for years, and others are more recent. Some are trying to find loopholes in the regulations in order to be able to channel private investor money in the acquisition of farmland because of provincial restrictions.”

Canada does not currently have any federals laws to protect against foreign interests investing in farmland. Provinces are responsible for regulating farmland purchases, with regulatory frameworks varying across the country. In 2003 Saskatchewan changed its provincial laws to allow out-of-province investment in its farmland.

According to the NFU, far from protecting small farms, the Canadian government has been paving the way for a non-farmer buy-up of Canada’s food land.

Crown agency Farm Credit Canada acts as the main financier for many of the country’s biggest farmland investment companies—providing multi-million-dollar loans and helping facilitate the sale or lease of land.

Michael Hoffort is a spokesperson from the agency and spoke with The Dominion regarding the NFU report.

“I wouldn’t say we are seeing a large amount of foreign investment coming towards farmland in Canada,” Hoffort said. “Often when it is a foreign investor, it is a farmer who is looking to immigrate into Canada, buy a farm and be a member of the community.”

But Farm Credit Canada has been very friendly to the largest Canadian farmland investment company Assiniboia, offering generous grants. The company has grown rapidly over the last two years, tripling its holdings to its current 100,000 acres.

Assiniboia’s primary source of capital is the taxpayer-owned Farm Credit Canada. In 2009, the company signed a mortgage agreement package that will see it receive an additional $9 million in borrowing capacity at “very low long-term rates,” according to an Assiniboia report.

When asked what data Farm Credit Canada has collected to compare how much foreign investment has been carried out over the last few years, Hoffort couldn’t give any figures.

“We haven’t done the analysis of crunching the numbers to find out how much farmland has been purchased domestically or by foreign buyers,” he said.

Hoffort explained that Farm Credit Canada only provides loans to applicants with a Canadian backer in the package, but he did not disclose what the percentage of the holding had to be Canadian.

“We lend to farms of all sizes,” he said. “The vast majority are family managed, and they come in many shapes and sizes. Farms in general have been growing in size for years—it is just part of the economy.”

Hoffort did have words to reassure the public. “Our focus is very much on agriculture, agricultural producers and the majority of those are by and large family farms. It has been in the past that way, and I can assure you that it will be that way in the future.”

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates there are currently over a billion people on the planet who suffer from hunger. The number continues to grow.

Kuyek believes the new phenomenon of agricultural land grabs provides important lessons about the failure of the market, and the failure of the global food system.

“We must get food production back in the hands of small farmers, ensuring their livelihood and ensuring that people are fed from the food system and that it isn’t about profit,” he said.

The urgency will only grow as these problems are compounded by climate change.

“The question is not ‘what do we do with all this private sector interest in farming that has sprung up,’” he said, “but rather ‘how do we create a system of farming, how do we create a food system that actually feeds people.’”

Amy Miller is a media maker and community organizer who resides in Montreal.

Land grab

Not In Anyone’s Backyard

dawn — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:23:04 +0000

Farmers in Alberta growing rural resistance to development

EDMONTON, ALBERTA–For much of its century-long history, the Schultz family farmstead has been a centre of community for farmers near Tofield, a place where people have gathered to pass time and bond with one another.

“The old farmstead here was always a very social spot in the old days,” recalls Brian Schultz, the current operator of the heritage farm located about 80 kilometres southeast of Edmonton, which has been his family’s home since 1904. “Ball games and snooker tournaments on the porch, square dances, strawberry socials, box socials, whatever. Our family has always been very community-oriented.”

It’s a tradition that Schultz has continued to this day, and for the last weekend of June he once again opened his farm to locals and what he calls “import people” from the city alike, as he has done since 1998, for the Wild Oats and Notes Music Festival.

While the festival is still about bringing the community together to enjoy good music and good company, there were also indications of an uneasiness lurking beneath the idyllic rural scene.

Snippets of conversation on the grass were just as likely to be about air quality concerns and baseline water testing as about the Ben Sures set. Chloroplast signs reading “Say No to Sherritt” and “EPCOR ... never mined” shared space on the barn walls with the BBQ price list. Tucked into the corner of the site, amidst the Canadian-flag-adorned folding chairs and colourful blankets, was a small tent staffed by volunteers from VOCAL, the Voice of Community and Land society, to which the proceeds of the festival were donated. They were there selling memberships and encouraging signatures on a petition to stop a controversial project that would see the land of over 100 farmers in the area, including the historic Schultz homestead, turned into a giant coal strip mine.

Opposition to the proposed $2.5 billion Dodds-Roundhill Coal Gasification Plant in Beaver County is just one example of a rising tide of community opposition to rampant oil, gas and energy development in rural Alberta.

Groups have sprouted up in Whitecourt and Peace River to oppose proposals to build Alberta’s first nuclear power plant. The Lavesta Area Group’s ongoing fight against powerlines in the central corridor was catapulted to front-page news when it was revealed that the now-defunct Energy and Utilities Board hired spies to keep tabs on them. Residents of the industrial heartland northeast of Edmonton are fighting the construction of up to nine upgraders to refine tar-sands oil.

“In Alberta now, it’s almost like being in a war zone. We’re getting hit left, right and centre,” said Schultz, himself a member of VOCAL, of the situation outside the province’s urban centres. “We are an energy province, there’s no doubt about it, but wow, we say yes too easy. We say yes way too easy for the short-term gain. That’s Alberta."

Saying yes to the Dodds-Roundhill project would radically change the face of the area around Schultz’s farm. If approved, over 300 square kilometres of agricultural land — roughly half the size of Edmonton — would be strip mined over a 40-year period to produce the coal needed to feed Canada’s first commercial coal-gasification plant. It would likely mean the destruction of an aquifer that lies beneath the land and currently provides water to farms in the area.

The plant would turn the coal into synthetic gas (syngas) — in amounts equivalent to a billion barrels of oil — to be used for a range of applications, including as fuel, a feedstock for the petrochemical industry or as a replacement for natural gas in refineries and bitumen upgraders.

While a spokesman from Sherritt’s corporate affairs department indicated no media relations spokespeople were available to speak, Sherritt’s January 2007 public disclosure document on the project outlines what Sherritt sees as the need for the facility: “The development of Alberta’s vast oil sands resource has resulted in increased demands for natural gas to produce steam for bitumen recovery and as a source of hydrogen for bitumen upgrading. ... The production of syngas through coal gasification provides alternatives to the use of natural gas to produce steam and hydrogen for bitumen extraction and upgrading.”

While Schultz says the community has been told the gas will ultimately feed the plants planned for "Upgrader Alley” northeast of Edmonton, the number of details which have changed since Sherritt first proposed the project two years ago means he’s not convinced that’s what will necessarily happen in the end.

“We don’t know — projects take so long to go, by the time this one’s ready to go it might not have anything to do with Fort Saskatchewan at all. They may produce electricity right there, throw it into the new grids that they’re talking about and send it right down to the United States.”

Schultz says one of his frustrations is that there appears to be no room in the process for the citizens who own the resource to decide how to best use it.

“This business decision is being made by private companies,” he says. “It has nothing to do with you as a citizen of Edmonton or the provincial government or the city of Edmonton saying, ‘Look, we’re short of power. We need more power to run our own lightbulbs or run our vacuum cleaners,’ or whatever. I actually wouldn’t be against that too much.”

He adds that the recent rise in food prices around the world, and a greater focus on local eating through approaches like the 100-mile diet, should be sending the message that while coal is an important resource, so is the food grown in the area around Edmonton.

“We’re treating this as if we’re the last generation, but this is not the last generation that’s going to raise food in this country. It’s not,” he says emphatically. “The price of food is going up all the time. We can’t really afford to be using our land for this type of thing. I think food’s fairly important. I think energy is important too, but not at all costs.”

Bill Sears, the chair of VOCAL, is the third generation to live on his thousand-acre family farm, located about a mile from Schultz’s land. His hundred-year-old farm will also be consumed by the strip mine if it goes ahead.

While part of the proposal includes a reclamation process which Sherritt says will allow farmers to return to farm their land after the mining is complete, Sears says he’s under no illusions.

“Sherritt will say it won’t be destroyed, Sherritt says it will be reclaimed. I say it will be destroyed. Our homes would be gone. Our farms would be gone. The trees would be gone. The wetlands would be gone. The natural areas would be gone. It would all be turned into a strip mine,” he laments, in a calm but indignant tone.

“There probably can be some argument made that it can be reclaimed for some sort of an agricultural production ... but you can’t reclaim what you see here, which is the buildings and the trees,” he says, gesturing around. “You know, that tree took a hundred years to grow, so you’re not going to reclaim that tree and you’re not going to reclaim our yards and our homes and all the infrastructure that goes with that. And you’re not going to reclaim our community, because our community will be gone.”

Sears sees VOCAL’s work to stop that future from becoming a reality as part of the same battle being waged all over the province.

“This is just one part of the thing that’s happening in Alberta. This is connected to the tar sands that are connected to the upgraders that are connected to this, that are connected to powerlines, pipelines, all the development that’s happening in the province.”

He has attended some of the recent hearings on Petro-Canada’s proposed upgrader in Sturgeon County and has met with residents of Upgrader Alley. He says that there he heard concerns that had a familiar ring.

“You know, they’re the same sorts of people — just ordinary farmers that want to be farming but are forced into this situation to protect their land,” he says. “You know, they talk about all the same things that we talk about: community, land, family values. But they’re forced into this.”

The knowledge that his family farm could be destroyed to produce a product that could go to fuel upgraders that might displace farmers in another part of the province only makes the pill more bitter to swallow for Sears. On the other hand, not producing the gas may make the natural gas in the Beaufort Sea valuable enough to finally make the Mackenzie Gas Project feasible, or could tilt things in favour of nuclear power, potentially impacting the people of Whitecourt or Peace River. Because of that, Sears says the haphazard approach of leaving these decisions to industry alone is the wrong way to go.

“The message we try to get out is, ‘What do the people of the province think?’ Ultimately the people of the province will have to decide what they see for the future of the province,” he says. “Do we continue this pace of development and continue the degradation of the landscape and the environment? How long do we do that? So in 40 years we mine this area out. The coal continues south. In 40, 50, 60, 100 years do we want to mine out a good portion of Central Alberta?

“We’ve got to start thinking about what comes down the road,” he continues. “What are we leaving for our kids? But that’s for the people of the province to decide. Because industry will develop — that’s their job. Government’s job and people’s job is to say how we want that development to take place.”

To that end, Sears says, VOCAL is talking to everyone who will listen about what’s happening in the area and meeting with as many MLAs as they can to let them know about local opposition to the project. He says they’re getting a good reception, especially from newer Conservative MLAs.

When I ask Sears about the reaction the group has received from their own MLA, the familiarity that is a reality of rural politics — where some of the impacted farmers are on a first-name basis with the premier — shows through.

“We’ve had good meetings with Mr. Stelmach. Of course, he’s known as Ed in this area. He listened very politely to us. There’s a lot of other pressures on him too. He’s the premier of a province that’s very dependent on the energy industry and it’s very important for them for money. Alberta does well and that’s a lot of pressure to [not] turn that tap off.”

Still, Sears hopes that Stelmach’s own rural background might make him more receptive to the concerns of landowners.

“I hope so. I hope so. Ed talks a lot about community and about roots and heritage and the value of his farm, so those are the same things that hit home when something like this happens,” Sears says. “He talks a lot about doing what’s right. So, we believe we’re doing what’s right and hopefully we can convince him that a project like this isn’t right.”

But Schultz says that finding political solutions is a problem because of the deep roots Stelmach’s party enjoys in rural Alberta generally, and in his Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville riding — where Stelmach received 77.6 per cent of the vote in the last election — specifically. He worries that many people in the area will continue to vote Conservative no matter what happens.

“Here in Conservative country, you know, jeez, I think the Conservative Party, they could probably kidnap your first-born son and I think the person would still vote for ‘em. We don’t have the ability to vote for someone else. We just don’t have any challengers.” But Schultz agrees that a political solution is their best chance to stop the mine, given the history of the rubber-stamp approvals process in the province.

“We know that once it gets to the hearing process you’re a done turkey. We have to change the decision before it gets into the hearing, because if you get into the decision-making process through the regulatory process, once it’s there you’re toast. Once you’re there in the province of Alberta you’re a done deal; you might as well give up and let ‘em do it.”

Construction on the project was originally slated to begin in 2009 and production by 2012, but the community was given a brief reprieve in late May when Sherritt announced it was putting its plans for Dodds-Roundhill on hold due to uncertainty about greenhouse-gas regulations in the province.

Mike Gibbs, a media spokesperson for the City of Edmonton-owned EPCOR, which announced in November 2007 that it had signed an agreement to provide power generation, water and wastewater treatment services for the project, says that as a result of the delay EPCOR is no longer involved in Dodds-Roundhill.

“At this point EPCOR has stopped work on the project,” says Gibbs, who admits he can’t say much more than that. “It doesn’t mean that it won’t go ahead, but as of right now EPCOR is not involved in the project and we will reassess once Sherritt completes its own assessment of the project.”

While Sears is pleased to hear that EPCOR isn’t working on the project, at least for the time being, he says the delay announced by Sherritt hasn’t caused members of the community opposed to the project to rest on their laurels.

On July 15, members of VOCAL met with Sherritt representatives and came away with the message that the company intends to proceed with the project by bringing forward their application in late 2008 or early 2009.

“They are saying that they are still very committed to the project, that they think the project is a very good project and they think that it’s badly needed, in their words,” he says.

“There was no beating around the bush. There wasn’t their talk that they had before about 'How do we make this project work for you?’ That was always their tack before, ‘How do we make this project so it’s acceptable to you?’ And we just say, ‘Well, just go away.’ But they didn’t take that tack this time. They took the tack that this project is going to go, and it was more or less, I think, ‘Be prepared for the fight.’ Which is not anything we didn’t expect.”

But Sears remains optimistic that the mine can be stopped, just as a similar one proposed for the area in the ‘70s was.

“I’m very hopeful. I really believe that the tide is starting to turn some in Alberta. Farmland is being looked at as more valuable than it was, with all of a sudden we have a food crisis, two years ago we didn’t have that. All of a sudden global warming is becoming a bigger issue. All of a sudden CO2 is becoming a bigger issue. These things are in the press, people are talking about it. I’m hopeful that we’re going to start moving in a direction that will take us away from our reliance on fossil fuels, and hopefully, maybe this can be a first step towards that.”

Scott Harris is News Editor at Edmonton's Vue Weekly, where a version of this article was originally published.

Not In Anyone’s Backyard

Indian Farmers Beat Back Tata

Geordie — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:38:39 +0000

Farmers in West Bengal, India have pushed Tata Motors off agricultural land.

"The West Bengal government acquired 1,000 acres of land for the Nano project in 2006.

"At least 10,000 farmers accepted compensation for their land, but approximately 2,000 of them rejected it as inadequate and demanded 400 acres of land be returned.

"'You cannot run a plant with police protection, you cannot run a plant when bombs are being thrown, you cannot run a plant when workers are being intimidated,' Tata said."

Battle for the Amazon

Moira Peters — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:14:49 +0000

Brazilian Supreme Court case pits farming in the Amazon against indigenous rights

The Brazilian Supreme Court has delayed a ruling that could have far-reaching effects on the Amazon and the thousands of indigenous people who live there. In question is the legality of a process that created an Indigenous Territory in northern Brazil, and the case threatens to reverse decades of progress on indigenous and social rights throughout the country.

After more than two decades of struggle for recognition, five indigenous groups in Brazil's northern Roraima state won the rights to their ancestral lands in 2005. Their efforts culminated in the creation of a new Indigenous Territory, Raposa Serra do Sol, which covers a large swath of the Amazon Rainforest on the border with Guyana.

In a decree signed by Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, over 18,000 indigenous Makuxi, Wapixana, Ingariko, Taukepang and Patamona peoples were granted 1.7 million hectares. Non-indigenous peoples were compensated and forced to leave the area. Although this might have brought an end to the long struggle for recognition of their territorial rights, the indigenous peoples of Raposa have faced fierce opposition from entrenched economic interests in Roraima.

In particular, a group of seven wealthy rice farmers has refused to leave the region, throwing the reserve into chaos. Known as fazendeiros, these large-scale farmers have rejected compensation and relocation, despite having arrived in the area less than 15 years ago.

A recent spate of violence against the indigenous peoples in the Raposa Territory has increased tensions. In April, an indigenous leader was attacked when a bomb was thrown at his house. In May, six Macuxi children and four adults were attacked and shot by armed men working for a rice farmer, and local mayor Paulo Cesar Quartiero. Quartiero was detained by police and later released, despite the discovery of a large weapons cache on his property.

Earlier, in April, the Supreme Court suspended an operation by the federal police to remove the remaining seven illegal occupants of the reserve: the fazendeiros had set up blockades and destroyed bridges in order to fight their eviction.

"Even with all the destruction carried out by the rice growers, the Supreme Court decided in their favor," Macuxi chief Dionito Jose de Sousa told the Associated Press in April.

According to Catarina Vianna, a member of Makunaima Grita, a Brazilian group dedicated to helping the indigenous people at Raposo Serra do Sol, the current struggle is a basic one for the peoples of Raposa.

"This is really a local conflict. It's about use of water, about the farms getting bigger and bigger,” she said by phone from London. “Now the indigenous people are saying, 'Enough, this has been recognized as our land.’"

With the support of the Roraima state government, the fazendeiros and state Governor José de Anchieta have appealed to Brazil's Supreme Court to break up the Raposa Territory and free up large amounts of the land.

"The farmers want the indigenous land to be divided into islands. They don't want the indigenous land to be a continuous tract of land. But legal experts in Brazil maintain that there is no legal basis to annul the 2005 demarcation," said Vianna.

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This comes at a time when President Silva has signed a decree to station troops permanently on all Indigenous Territories on the border. There has been talk among top officials in the Brazilian Armed Forces about foreign meddling in the largely-indigenous border region. Citing risks to national sovereignty, it appears the military feels threatened by the formation of Indigenous Territories.

"The military has an agenda," said Vianna, "to protect Brazilian sovereignty. It's been their main discourse since the dictatorship in the 60s and 70s. They are against the demarcation of continuous indigenous lands near the border because they want to control what happens [there], and they're afraid that what they call 'foreign interests' will use the Indians to then exploit the Amazon."

The military is using the conflict in Roraima to support these goals, suggesting the presence of drug traffickers and guerrilla groups in indigenous lands, and has called for the Supreme Court to annul Raposa Serra do Sol's boundaries.

According to Tim Cahill, a researcher on Brazil with human-rights organization Amnesty International, the military has long tried to taint social movements in Brazil by claiming connections to foreign revolutionary groups.

"In relation to the accusations of money coming in from Venezuela and FARC rebels – I have no evidence for or against it," he said. "But it's fair to say that whenever there's some criticism or attack to be made against social movements in Brazil... the FARC are always dragged out, although very little evidence is ever provided to prove these allegations. So it seems once again that it's an attempt to criminalize social movements in Brazil and discredit their work [that benefits] the poor and the marginalized."

Cahill says that the military – which has total access and freedom of movement in Indigenous Territories – does not have a good reputation among indigenous peoples.

"Indigenous people across the Amazon have persistently complained to Amnesty and denounced violations committed by soldiers who work indigenous areas – sexual abuse, physical abuse, and intimidation," he said. "There seems to be a clear contradiction in the sense that indigenous areas are meant to limit the access into those areas to guarantee their safety and protection. Yet when the Army goes in there, time and time again we see that [indigenous] rights are violated."

However, the military is unrepentant and has made it clear that no group's rights supersede those of the Brazilian Armed Forces.

"We want to be clear on something fundamental – Indian lands are Brazilian lands," said Defense Minister Nelson Jobim, according to a May Reuters article. "There are no nations or Indian peoples, there are Brazilians who are Indians."

The Brazilian Ministry of Defense was contacted for this piece, but declined to comment.

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Cahill believes the real causes for the current conflict over Raposa go deeper than the military's security concerns. He says that this case represents a key moment in the face-off between indigenous rights and the interests of big business in Brazil, and big agrobusiness in particular.

"This is something we see not only in the Amazon, but across Brazil," he said. "The cultural, social and economic rights of indigenous peoples tend to come into conflict with the economic interests of big agro-industry. And big agro-industry has been the driving force of the recent economic boom that's occuring in Brazil, and we've seen that there's a lot of political and judicial support for their interests."

"In this case, it's not that the military has allied itself with the farmers," said Vianna. "Rather, two separate interests have come together. This handful of farmers – they're extremely wealthy. It's not about them. It's about how Brazil will use the Amazon. Are they going to just leave it to the Indians, who won't develop it? Or does Brazil have a plan for developing the Amazon? This is a discourse of economic development.

"That's why the farmers are using economic arguments. They are saying, 'What we do is good for the state and national economy.' They call themselves the 'Nationalist Resistance.' They consider themselves those who represent the nation, against the Indians who are supported by 'foreign interests.' They never say who these 'interests' are. But by conflating the local conflict into this language of nationalism and development – of developing the nation – they were able to get closer to the military's cause."

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Rogerio Duarte do Pateo, a Sao Paulo-based member of Makunaima Grita, signalled that the consequences of the court's ruling could extend far beyond Raposa's borders.

"A decision against Raposa would create the legal precedents to revoke all indigenous titles to land in Brazil," he said. "Any other territory could be contested, [such as] the Yanomami, Kayapó."

Both Pateo and Cahill believe a decision against Raposa would not only violate the Brazilian Constitution, but it could put at risk the gains made over the last 30 years in terms of indigenous rights, throughout Brazil.

"What is on the line here is Article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution and the indigenous rights that are laid out in that article," Pateo said. "It's not that the court decision will directly affect the Constitution, but the arguments that are being used go against Article 231 – it seems that the justice system is going to favour the big landowners – and this will open up the way to revise Article 231."

"The 1988 Constitution allows indigenous people the process to set out and identify their ancestral lands," said Cahill. "There's a real fear that this will set back cases across the country of indigenous peoples who continue to fight for the rights to their land, and who, through this process, continue to seek the provision of their basic human rights and cultural rights."

According to a statement signed by 85 Brazilian NGOs in support of Raposa Serra do Sol, the Constitution "defined the rights of indigenous peoples over their lands and established that these rights enjoy over-riding precedence over any subsequent rights granted to non-indigenous holders."

However, Brazil's indigenous peoples are still fighting for these rights – and those outlined in the recently-adopted UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – to be upheld and put into practice.

"Indigenous peoples are considered minors under Brazilian law… The demarcation process doesn't give [them] full rights to their land, but allows the land to be held by the federal government in custody for them," Cahill said. "[It is] an issue which has been hotly contested and which many believe limits the rights of indigenous peoples to their full citizenship and full rights under international law."

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Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the case represents a key moment in the decades-long struggle for indigenous rights in Brazil.

"It would seriously undermine the whole system of Indian reserves in Brazil if the courts were to bow to pressure from influential landowners and politicians, particularly given the violence the Indians have been subjected to," said Miriam Ross, from Survival International.

According to Pateo, a ruling against the Raposa territory would not only undermine the recent successes in relation to indigenous rights, but would "mark the future of development in Brazil in relation to the Amazon,” giving a clear signal to logging, hydroelectric and agricultural companies that the Amazon is up for grabs.

The ruling was to be announced on August 27, but was delayed when one of the judges requested more time to look into the case.

"Will we continue a predatory model of exploitation that doesn't respect the law?" Pateo asks. "Or will Brazil be transformed – definitively – into a country that develops itself sustainably, and respects human rights?"

Watch video of the May attack on Macuxi Indians in Raposa Serra do Sol.

Raposa Indigenous After Attack