ABSTRACT
The Niagara Fruit Belt stands as an important symbol to the long and difficult struggle to preserve a unique agricultural resource in Canada. This chapter examines how a unique agricultural resource, at times attracting considerable publicity and favourable responses from government regarding preservation, could be so constantly threatened and buried forever by urban development. The encroachment of urban development on unique agricultural lands in Niagara became a public issue and found its way into the media and the political realm in the early 1950s. Outside the urban-area boundaries the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) formulated rural land-use policies based on the quality of land base with the good tender-fruit and good grape land areas being restricted to agriculturally-related developments. The OMB, in its decision in 1981, paid tribute to the work of Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society in being the sole defender of the wider public interest in preserving unique agricultural resources in Niagara.
