How Canada can grow to be a world meals safety superpower

Discover key highlights within the Web3 house. This article dives into: “How Canada can become a global food security superpower”.

New Atlanticist

July 15, 2025 • 12:17 pm ET

How Canada can grow to be a world meals safety superpower

By
Ginger Matchett and Peter Engelke

Achieving meals safety is a strategic crucial throughout the Americas. Canada is a crucial piece of this hemispheric equation, given its agricultural scale and capability for innovation. Yet to maximise its potential as a hemispheric and international meals safety superpower, Canada might want to overcome constraints that hinder its competitiveness and talent to ship its agricultural property to international markets. By rectifying these shortcomings and specializing in productiveness progress, Canada can construct a stronger and extra resilient agri-food system that can permit it to play the position of meals safety superpower properly into the longer term.

In late May, the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s GeoStrategy Initiative, in partnership with the Mosaic Company, hosted the second non-public roundtable of its “Food Security: Strategic Alignment in the Americas” mission. This roundtable, held in Ottawa, introduced collectively dozens of main consultants from analysis establishments, universities, the agri-food trade, authorities, and multilateral establishments throughout Canada and the Americas. Our conclusions are primarily based on the insights from this dialogue.

Canada’s problem

Though Canada is a comparatively food-secure nation, its agri-food sector nonetheless faces a number of challenges. These challenges inhibit Canada’s farmers and agri-food producers, processors, and retailers from reaching their potential. For instance, Canada has transportation and logistics bottlenecks, in addition to restricted funds for analysis and growth (R&D) in science and innovation. The nation can be experiencing declines in its arable cropland and a deterioration of its soil well being, which enhance the urgency of upgrading its agricultural sector’s local weather resilience via a spread of investments and improved practices.

Politics and economics are additionally elements. On July 10, US President Trump threatened a 35 p.c tariff on Canadian imports, together with agriculture merchandise. While commerce negotiations between Ottawa and Washington are ongoing, the prospect of rising commerce tensions is a priority. Canadian farmers worry that if commerce tensions proceed or worsen, then it will seemingly restrict entry to reasonably priced, regular provides of crop inputs, together with chemical compounds, seeds, and fertilizer. This concern has underscored the necessity to enhance nationwide self-sufficiency for the sustainability and resiliency of Canadian agriculture. Such efforts require public sector insurance policies that can assist insulate Canada’s agri-food system from exterior disruptions to markets and associated techniques, resembling crop insurance coverage applications designed to assist unsure manufacturing circumstances.

Four methods ahead

There are 4 essential the reason why Canada has not but reached its potential as a hemispheric and international meals safety superpower.

First, as Canada is an especially giant nation, it’s crucial that agri-food items transfer effectively and reliably throughout provinces to worldwide markets. Unfortunately, Canada faces vital obstacles. A essential concern is underinvestment within the nation’s bodily and digital infrastructure, inhibiting the environment friendly transport of products from provinces to ports. If a bridge in British Columbia is compromised and even collapses, for instance, this disrupts the transport of grain from the nation’s inside. Another vital downside considerations interprovincial commerce and labor requirements, which act as inside limitations to commerce. Provinces all through Canada have totally different transportation regulations, together with distinct guidelines in regards to the acceptable dimension of automobiles transporting items, and staff will need to have particular provincial licenses for employment. These inside limitations represent drags on nationwide financial progress and sectoral productiveness. They create inefficiencies, elevate prices, discourage funding, exacerbate shortages, and inhibit innovation. The International Monetary Fund estimates that eliminating inside commerce limitations on items alone would enhance Canada’s productiveness by 3.8 p.c.

Second, Canada’s agri-food sector—which creates 2.3 million jobs and makes up 7.4 p.c of the nation’s gross home product (GDP)—is an export-oriented trade that has grow to be overly reliant on a small variety of giant buying and selling companions, particularly the United States. Although these buying and selling companions will stay crucial, Canada ought to diversify its export markets. Building stronger relationships with a better variety of buying and selling companions is important to lowering vulnerability.

Free commerce offers, such because the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, can function templates for comparable agreements Canada may strike with international locations throughout the Americas and all through the world. Roundtable individuals famous how such agreements present Canada with cooperative platforms with frequent guidelines and commitments, resulting in expanded commerce, funding, and employment. Similar agreements with different international locations within the Western Hemisphere may facilitate extra agri-food commerce in progress markets, regardless of present geopolitical turbulence and financial disruption. Participants emphasised alternatives for Canada via funding in and export of nutrient-dense meals, together with animal protein, greens, and legumes.

A 3rd cause why Canada has not reached its potential is inadequate R&D funding. Though Canada has considerably improved its skill to generate larger agriculture yields from a reducing quantity of arable land via modern farming practices, funding within the agriculture sector and home manufacturing has decreased and is liable to additional decline. Roundtable individuals burdened that Canada is falling behind in R&D and that the federal government should play a task in incentivizing farmers, agri-food processors, and meals retailers to commit extra assets to innovation.

Leveraging Canada’s historic preeminence in expertise growth, together with in rising applied sciences resembling artificial intelligence, may enhance the nation’s agricultural competitiveness. Embracing modern applied sciences within the agri-food sector may, for instance, enhance tech-enabled commerce infrastructure and provide chains, making them that rather more environment friendly, sustainable, and local weather resilient. Digital options provide Canada a path to enhancing broadband accessibility and infrastructure throughout the huge rural and distant stretches of the nation. High-speed web connectivity, entry to knowledge, and autonomous tools on farms and agri-food processing facilities may revolutionize Canada’s AgTech footprint. According to a report from Royal Bank of Canada, such developments may alleviate labor scarcity pressures and assist develop Canada’s annual agricultural GDP by eight billion {dollars} by 2030.

Finally, Canada lacks a powerful industrial coverage for meals and agriculture. Policymakers have to develop a strategic, systems-based strategy to the agri-food sector that encompasses your complete provide chain. Doing so will grow to be an more and more necessary process. It is value remembering that meals safety just isn’t assured—not in Canada, the Western Hemisphere, nor wherever else on this planet. By 2035, there will likely be practically 9 billion mouths to feed, lots of whom can have the earnings and accessibility to reap the benefits of larger high quality meals like the sort Canada has a status for producing. To meet this demand, the world might want to produce 14 p.c extra meals, feed, and biofuels in what’s going to seemingly be a tougher context owing to a altering local weather, commerce disruptions, and a much less predictable worldwide safety surroundings.

Canada just isn’t exempt from such stresses: Although the nation is meals safe, a proportion of Canadian households nonetheless endure from growing meals insecurity. Nearly ten million Canadians have been reported as dwelling in meals insecure households in 2024, up from 5.8 million in 2021. To reverse this development, social insurance policies ought to focus extra intensively on at-risk teams, particularly lowest-income households. Federal, provincial, and territorial insurance policies that increase wages and incomes, or present social help resembling little one care advantages, are particularly helpful.

Despite these obstacles, Canada possesses appreciable assets that it may possibly use to its benefit. If policymakers and enterprise leaders make vital progress throughout the 4 areas highlighted above, Canada can maximize its potential as an agri-food superpower within the Western Hemisphere and past.

Ginger Matchett is a program assistant with the GeoStrategy Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security in addition to a senior fellow with its Global Energy Center.

Further studying

Image: ALBERTA, CANADA – JULY 7:
Grain silos rise alongside a yellow canola subject alongside Highway 2 (Queen Elizabeth II Highway) in Alberta, Canada, on July 7, 2025. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto) REUTERS

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