Agri-food sector needs new vision for future

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2023 (746 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was unsettling to the point of shocking for Canadians to learn during the pandemic that they couldn’t always get the food items they wanted at their grocery store.

That was followed by the worst food price inflation consumers in this country have experienced in generations.

A new report by the Canadian Agricultural Policy Institute shatters any illusion that those experiences over the past three years were isolated. Rather, it highlights a rising tide of vulnerabilities for the agri-food sector that can’t be viewed in isolation.

“Canadian Agri-Food Resilience: A Toolbox for Managing Crises” lays out a compelling case for the need to reconsider the underlying drivers behind how industry decisions are made if the sector is to successfully navigate the challenges ahead.

“Supply chain resilience is the ability of supply chains to retain their essential functions in the face of the destabilizing crisis,” CAPI’s director of research Al Mussell said in a video explaining the report.

“It presents a contrast to lean, just-in-time, but potentially frail supply chains,” he said.

For much of the past 50 years, the push in agriculture and food has been towards squeezing redundancies and costs out of the production, transportation, processing, and distribution. The sector has been obsessed with becoming more consolidated, streamlined, and specialized.

Pre-pandemic disruptions were easily discounted as abnormal hiccups that didn’t overshadow the highly efficient models that had emerged.

Although there was awareness of growing threats to the sector’s ability to function, such as a shrinking labour force, lagging transportation capacity or a lack of livestock disease preparedness, there’s been an inability to move from talking about it to doing something about it.

Industry safeguards in place today are built to address each crisis in isolation.

“We have entered an era of converging crises with combinations of three or more crises becoming common. These crises can result from a multitude of sources, including physical, geopolitical, cultural, human and animal health, and economic policies,” the report says.

“The convergence of multiple crises — sometimes compounding, sometimes interrelated, and sometimes both — can result in synergistic impacts in which the total disruptive power is greater than the sum of the parts,” the report says.

Labour shortages, disease outbreaks, more market concentration, regulation, and food and trade policy used a geopolitical weapon are just some of the threats identified. Who has time to think about the cascading implications of climate change?

The CAPI researchers are promoting the development of a “crisis management toolbox” after consultations with stakeholders, risk and vulnerability mapping and efforts to quantify the impacts. Only then can stakeholders develop their response.

One of the key takeaways is that Canada’s agri-food sector needs a long-term vision, one that looks beyond setting production and export sales targets. This is no easy task when there continues to be a wide range of views on how to confront some of the key threats the sector needs to address.

“A long-term vision must recognize supply chain vulnerabilities including climate-trade disasters, new-emerging diseases and pathogens, international trade conflicts, sharp inflation in input costs, and cybersecurity,” the report says.

Does the answer lie in retrenching into the smaller, more diverse models of the past, thereby spreading the risk around? Or does it lie in consolidation to better control the response? Or is it something in between?

Speaking of long-term visions, CAPI is a welcome rarity in this time of polarized public debates driven by ideology and special-interest “think-tanks.” It’s been around since 2004 as an independent, non-partisan and not-for-profit corporation providing critical analysis of industry issues and practices. Although it receives some of its funding from government, it is guided by a board of directors drawn from a wide cross-section of the industry.

Its latest report should set the stage for pivotal change in how Canada’s agricultural and food sector sets its future course.

I say “should” rather than “will” because whether remains to be seen.

Government policy, industry practices and individual behaviours don’t change easily or quickly. That goes for any sector, let alone one that is so fragmented along commodity and regional lines — yet so vital to Canada’s national security.

Laura Rance is vice-president of content for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com