How Canada can become a global food security superpower

Uncover the newest traits within the DeFi 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 become a global food security superpower

By
Ginger Matchett and Peter Engelke

Achieving food security is a strategic crucial throughout the Americas. Canada is a essential piece of this hemispheric equation, given its agricultural scale and capability for innovation. Yet to maximise its potential as a hemispheric and global food security superpower, Canada might want to overcome constraints that hinder its competitiveness and talent to ship its agricultural property to global markets. By rectifying these shortcomings and specializing in productiveness development, Canada can construct a stronger and extra resilient agri-food system that can permit it to play the function of food security superpower effectively into the long run.

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” undertaking. 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 improve the urgency of upgrading its agricultural sector’s local weather resilience by a vary of investments and improved practices.

Politics and economics are additionally components. On July 10, US President Trump threatened a 35 % 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 concern. Canadian farmers worry that if commerce tensions proceed or worsen, then it might doubtless restrict entry to inexpensive, 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 methods, equivalent to crop insurance coverage packages designed to help unsure manufacturing circumstances.

Four methods ahead

There are 4 important explanation why Canada has not but reached its potential as a hemispheric and global food security superpower.

First, as Canada is a particularly giant nation, it’s essential that agri-food items transfer effectively and reliably throughout provinces to worldwide markets. Unfortunately, Canada faces important obstacles. A important problem 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 important downside considerations interprovincial commerce and labor requirements, which act as inner boundaries to commerce. Provinces all through Canada have completely different transportation laws, together with distinct guidelines regarding the acceptable measurement of automobiles transporting items, and employees will need to have particular provincial licenses for employment. These inner boundaries represent drags on nationwide financial development and sectoral productiveness. They create inefficiencies, elevate prices, discourage funding, exacerbate shortages, and inhibit innovation. The International Monetary Fund estimates that eliminating inner commerce boundaries on items alone would improve Canada’s productiveness by 3.8 %.

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

Free commerce offers, such because the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, can function templates for comparable agreements Canada might strike with international locations throughout the Americas and all through the world. Roundtable members 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 might facilitate extra agri-food commerce in development markets, regardless of present geopolitical turbulence and financial disruption. Participants emphasised alternatives for Canada by 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 means to generate increased agriculture yields from a reducing quantity of arable land by progressive farming practices, funding within the agriculture sector and home manufacturing has decreased and is vulnerable to additional decline. Roundtable members careworn that Canada is falling behind in R&D and that the federal government should play a function in incentivizing farmers, agri-food processors, and food retailers to commit extra sources to innovation.

Leveraging Canada’s historic preeminence in know-how growth, together with in rising applied sciences equivalent to synthetic intelligence, might improve the nation’s agricultural competitiveness. Embracing progressive applied sciences within the agri-food sector might, 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 information, and autonomous tools on farms and agri-food processing facilities might revolutionize Canada’s AgTech footprint. According to a report from Royal Bank of Canada, such developments might alleviate labor scarcity pressures and assist develop Canada’s annual agricultural GDP by eight billion {dollars} by 2030.

Finally, Canada lacks a robust industrial coverage for food and agriculture. Policymakers have to develop a strategic, systems-based strategy to the agri-food sector that encompasses all the provide chain. Doing so will become an more and more necessary activity. It is price remembering that food security will not be assured—not in Canada, the Western Hemisphere, nor anyplace else on the planet. By 2035, there might be almost 9 billion mouths to feed, lots of whom could have the revenue and accessibility to make the most of increased high quality meals like the type Canada has a fame for producing. To meet this demand, the world might want to produce 14 % extra food, feed, and biofuels in what is going to doubtless be a tougher context owing to a altering local weather, commerce disruptions, and a much less predictable worldwide security surroundings.

Canada will not be exempt from such stresses: Although the nation is food safe, a proportion of Canadian households nonetheless undergo from growing food insecurity. Nearly ten million Canadians had been reported as residing in food insecure households in 2024, up from 5.8 million in 2021. To reverse this pattern, social insurance policies ought to focus extra intensively on at-risk teams, particularly lowest-income households. Federal, provincial, and territorial insurance policies that enhance wages and incomes, or present social help equivalent to baby care advantages, are particularly helpful.

Despite these obstacles, Canada possesses appreciable sources that it can use to its benefit. If policymakers and enterprise leaders make important 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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