Needed: a long-term vision for Canadian agriculture

What does Canada’s agriculture and food sector need to do to insulate itself from major disruptions?

Read Also

Bringing food influencers and producers together has benefits

Poonam Dattani, a Markham-area registered dietician, now feels better equipped to provide her clients with dairy and beef production facts….

According to the latest Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI) report “A Toolbox for Managing Crises,” farmers, federal policy makers, and everyone in between needs to stop working in isolation to extinguish individual fires, and adopt a more dynamic approach to problem solving.

In practice, that means developing a much wider understanding of the myriad of issues facing each sector, how those issues impact one another, and actually implement long-term strategies to account for risks. This approach, argue the report’s authors, has been lacking to-date. By focusing on day-to-day operations and problems on an individual business or sector level, Canada’s agriculture and food system remains more vulnerable to major disruptive events than it ought to be.

Why it matters: Current and past responses to major disruptions, by both industry and government, have been ad-hoc and will prove inadequate in the event of multiple disruptions occurring simultaneously. More all-encompassing, industry-wide efforts at reducing vulnerability are required.

A crisis management toolbox

As described in the report summary, years of disruption driven by a pandemic, climate change and extreme weather, geopolitics, and more, has generated significant concern about the reliability of supply chains. This has prompted a shift in how people think about supply chains, from lean, just-in-time, high-efficiency, and low-cost, to understanding threats, monitoring resilience, and striking a balance between efficiency and resilience. People have, in short, realized seemingly small issues can have outsized impacts on the highly-tuned machine that is a just-in-time system.

The prospect of multiple crises converging, however, could have much more severe impacts.

The risk is particularly significant given Canada lacks a long-term vision for the Canadian agri-food sector – something not helped by federal policy being limited to five-year cycles. This translates to programs and policies which cannot account for simultaneously-occurring crises or prolonged crisis periods, less effective research, strategy, and analysis, and greater difficulty recognizing the impact of economic, environmental, as well as social issues.

“There’s so much happening and so many crises occurring. We were trying to create tools so the industry can take a more dynamic view of everything that’s happening,” says Dr. Karen Hand, one of the report authors, and founder and president of Precision Strategic Solutions.

“That’s very difficult when you have competing disruptors. How do you create a risk landscape so you can appropriately decide on long term strategies? How do we proceed and approach these risks to enhance agriculture resilience? What do we need to consider when were looking at this very complex system?”

Hand and her fellow contributors suggest a six-part framework, or a “crisis management toolbox” for analyzing vulnerability in any sector within Canada’s agri-food industry. The first step involves investigating “what keeps agri-food stakeholders up at night” through exhaustive consultations with every level of a given sector, from primary producers to processors, and beyond. Case studies can then be developed and analyzed, and all vulnerabilities mapped – overburdened meat processing capacity, or barriers to expanding provincial meat processing, for example. Once mapped, the order in which potential disruptions should be addressed can be set.

The proposed framework might sound basic, but from Hand’s perspective, no central hub for such an approach exists. There is no effective body, or series of bodies, where farmers, commodity groups, scientists and other experts have come together to analyze risk and vulnerabilities with a broad perspective. For her, this is partly a result of a lack of vision in leadership, and where leadership is present, a failure to translate it into policy.

“We need to talk to everyone to know what’s going on at the farm, in transport, processing, or we will not know the full impact of disruptions like a pandemic,” says Hand.

Bruce Stephen, one of the CAPI report coordinators and consultant working in the agriculture sector, says the intention was to inform federal and provincial players – both government and agriculture organizations – as well as individual farms. At every level, the idea is to get people to lessen their focus on the immediate risks and focus on the strategic risks longer term.

“Immediate risks, that’s where a lot of people in agriculture, even in government, are preoccupied by all the things hitting the windscreen today, and not that big sinkhole coming down the road,” Stephen says.

Although central to the report’s purpose, supply chain issues are not the only risks farmers, governments, and agricultural organizations can better prepare for.

“The analogy is farm transition, and the growing complexity of farm transition, when you think about tax implications, environmental implications…How do you look forward ten years and keep abreast of it every year as opposed to setting a plan and not doing anything with it for those ten years. That’s the simplified example I’ve been using.”

The complexity of supply chain issues themselves spurs psychological challenges. Temporary resolutions, says Stephen, can fool us into thinking the wider problem has been resolved.

“These are all things people know about, but don’t know what to do, so chuck [the problem] away. I think everybody thinks someone else has to step in and fix it, the federal and provincial governments being the main targets. But then you get top-down solutions,” he says.

“The big thing we were trying to get across in this report is somebody has to think about how to build the governance or operating structure – how to build ownership of this.”

Both Hand and Stephen say the original intention was to develop a much more in-depth document guiding farmers and agricultural organizations through the risk assessment process. However, time and resource constraints limited an intended 24-to-30-month project to just seven months.

“We’re really hoping the [federal government] see their way to taking a deeper dive to develop this strategy further. There’s a lot more that could be done,” says Stephen.

A failure from the top

Keith Currie, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, agrees. The United States, he says, maintains a comprehensive general plan for its agriculture sector. When something happens requiring action, that plan can be analyzed and tweaked, but it remains in place as part of a longer-term strategy.

There is no such plan for the Canadian agriculture sector, with governments continuing to respond in a reactionary way to each individual crisis.

“Reactions and answers often have unintended consequences in agriculture. The industry itself is so large, when you pick a specific area, you’re going to affect others without realizing it,” says Currie, citing the need for a comprehensive, long-term vision for managing climate crises – such as major storms in the Atlantic provinces, and fires in the west – as an example of sorely needed policy.

“We need this, but we don’t have anything. We’re not learning from past situations. There’s no big picture plan on how we react to that, how we deal with that.”

Currie says the carbon tax offers a prominent example of how good intentions can have wide ranging, unintended consequences.

“I think the biggest factor we’ve been facing is the carbon tax. It’s had devastating effects on bottom lines. Every service we use charges a carbon tax. We have to pay that. I understand the purpose, but its not doing what [the federal government] intended. It’s things like that that really get in the way of this industry taking off. These are the kinds of things that we somehow need to get that message across.”

The fundamental problem, from the Federation’s perspective, is a lack of understanding or willingness to act from the federal government. Provincial governments, says Currie, are typically more engaged in the sector, although he wonders whether than itself makes garnering federal attention more challenging.

“I think it’s the case of the feds saying ‘you guys invest so we don’t have to’…The frustrating part for agriculture is we see what the economics of the industry are, and what it can do, but government doesn’t appear to notice,” says Currie. He also wishes organizations like the Federation had more resources for education focused on consumers – specifically, what Canadian agriculture means, what it means to buy Canadian food, and just how important the sector is economically.

“In Ontario, nearly $50 billion in [gross domestic product] is from agriculture, but people still think the economy drives on four wheels,” he says, referring to the misconception that the automotive sector is the province’s largest industry.

“People need to know the value of that food to them, to the economy and to the country. Most governments don’t understand what they have. Food production is pretty fundamental for most people, but no one seems to realize it.”