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With prices for many crops like corn and wheat soaring, farmland has become a hot commodity. By some estimates, investment funds have bought $20-billion (U.S.) worth of farmland in recent years, mainly in Africa and Eastern Europe. Those funds snapped up 111 million acres in 2009 alone, a tenfold increase from previous years.
Canadian farmland has become particularly attractive lately and many foreign and Canadian investors are eager to buy as much as possible. But Canada's patchwork system of provincial land-ownership rules makes buying on a large scale tricky.
For example, it is relatively easy for anyone to buy farmland in Ontario but much more difficult in Saskatchewan. Foreigners are limited to owning just 10 acres in that province, and all publicly traded companies and pension funds are generally blocked from buying any farmland at all.
As a result, the average price of farmland in Saskatchewan is around $500 an acre, roughly three to eight times lower than farmland in Ontario and ten times lower than agricultural land in much of the United States and Europe.
There have been calls in Saskatchewan to ease the province's land-ownership rules, but so far the government has resisted.
Paul Waldie