Paving over prime agricultural land for a food distribution warehouse is wrong- July 29, 2008

Surrey City Council again showed its true colours when it voted to re-zone a parcel of A-1 (agricultural) land for the purpose of paving it over and constructing a 421,000 square foot concrete warehouse.

Many people at the public hearing spoke to the fact that once prime agricultural land is paved over with concrete, it can not be reclaimed as farmland. It is lost as agricultural land forever.

But only Councillors Bob Bose and Judy Villeneuve voted against this project. Meanwhile, this past Sunday, July 27th, the Farmland Defence League of BC held a well-attended dinner at the Semiahmoo Fish & Game Club to celebrate the decision made 35 years ago to protect much of our prime agricultural land in BC through the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).

Protecting and preserving our farmland is even more important than it was back in 1973. We are facing multiple challenges in terms of food security: food shortages are occurring around the world; the price of oil is making the cost of importing food much more expensive; and more and more people are realizing the environmental and health benefits of growing food locally.

Mayor Watts and her Surrey First councillors use sustainability as a buzz word. They even passed a Sustainability Charter for the city. But sustainability includes being able to feed ourselves from our own land as much as possible. Once upon a time, 86 per cent of the vegetables we ate were grown locally.

Sustainability means preserving the precious farmland that we have left in the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley, whether or not it is already protected by the Agricultural Land Reserve. It means properly leveraging this land so that we can maximize the productivity of food production.

Why then would our current city council vote to destroy precious agricultural land and build a giant warehouse which, ironically enough, will be used as a food distribution centre for food trucked in from afar? I strongly believe we have a responsibility to our children, and future generations, to leave behind as much farmland as possible so they are able to feed themselves.

The City of Surrey's land-use and zoning policies must properly reflect the principles in the recently-released Sustainability Charter, which speaks to the fact that we ought to support local food production for our children and grandchildren.

What the mayor and her council have done is just plain wrong.