ONTARIO’S ROOTS
Province has grown product for centuries, but top buyer has suddenly stopped paying
Province’s farmers dominate the global ginseng market, but are having trouble getting paid,
On a drizzly spring morning in a small town150 kilometres southwest of Toronto, an event hall fills up with farmers who dominate production of one of the world’s most valuable crops: ginseng.
In a sea of baseball caps, camouflage-print jackets and jeans, more than100 growers have come for their annual association meeting. The gathering in Delhi, a town of 4,000, is the biggest turnout in a long time, because, after years of stellar growth, a mystery has enveloped the industry: their biggest customer has disappeared.
Farmers talk in low voices at the back of the room about what has happened to Hang Fat, the company in Hong Kong that had become the biggest buyer of the crop over the past few years before suddenly stopping payments.
“There’s tension and there’s skepticism, and there’s obviously some worry in the farming community,” said Larry Sitko, who’s been growing ginseng since starting with one acre in 1991. “The ginseng industry isn’t going anywhere, but it might hurt a number of growers who haven’t had their money.”
How did rural Ontario became the centre of a trade worth half a billion dollars a year, linking the fate of hundreds of family farms to a gnarled root prized in China as a medicine and health food?
It begins more than three centuries ago, with Canada’s first inhabitants, an 18th-century Jesuit priest and some of the earliest trade between Canada and China.
The aboriginal Iroquois people of eastern Canada were the first known users of ginseng in North America, harvesting the wild root for use in ceremonies and as medicine to relieve fever, ease sinus problems and reduce swelling. In the United States, the Cherokee thought ginseng could “make itself invisible to those unworthy to gather it.”
It was invisible until Jesuit priest Joseph-Francois Lafitau started hunting for the root around 1715. Aware of its value to the Chinese, he flagged its presence to traders who soon made it one of Canada’s earliest and largest exports to Asia.
By the 1750s, trade collapsed due to overharvesting and the traders’ failure to dry the root properly, yielding a lower-quality product.
By the late 1800s, ginseng was being cultivated in Ontario in small quantities, but farmers here were much more interested in another crop that was rising in demand the world over: tobacco. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when government restrictions on tobacco companies and more healthconscious consumers reduced demand, that growers began looking for an alternative that would thrive here and provide the same high returns.
From then on, ginseng boomed. Ontario farmers are set to grow a record 3,350 hectares of ginseng this year, according to the industry association, almost double the land devoted to the root in 2001. The root contributes more than $600 million annually to the economy, the industry association said at its meeting.
It’s the region’s lifeblood and the farmers here are cautious about revealing too much about last year’s crop or their finances.
“There’s a lot of confusion,” said Henry Kukielka from his tractor on his farm in the nearby town of Vanessa. He’s been farming for more than three decades and grows ginseng, vegetables, and corn.
“You have to weather the storm. We’re survivors here.”