The Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) is giving a thumbs up to the federal government's National Food Security Strategy, announced June 11.
Ottawa says $3 billion will be invested over ten years to create more competition in the grocery sector, build infrastructure to support local food hubs & terminals, increase domestic food production in Canada, and reduce red tape across the agricultural supply chain.
CFA says they're pleased to see the federal government show a "renewed focus and substantial investments to create a more resilient agri-food sector that will improve farm competitiveness and food affordability."
President of CFA Keith Currie says a couple of the announcements aren't new ideas as they've been advocated before in years past.
One example is reducing red tape. The federal government committed to modernizing regulations to speed up the approval process for seeds, feed, fertilizers, and veterinary products.
"That's been a constant ask for agriculture for quite some time now. It's not so much of just removing our regulations and policies, but to streamline them to make them more workable, usable, without losing what regulatory frameworks do in guiding us. The more that we can modernize our regulatory framework to make it user-friendly, so to speak, I think we're all in on that and we're looking forward to working on the government and how we can do that moving forward." he said.
Another is the $1 billion investment towards building new and expanded food terminals and hubs, to help "independent grocers buy and move competitively priced products without relying on large retail chains", according to a news release from the Canadian government.
Currie remembers the idea of local food hubs being suggested years ago.
"I can remember probably 15 to 20 years ago when I was working with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the concept of more local food hubs was something we raised back then," he said. ". I think it's certainly a way to promote local food more, have Canadians have greater access to local food. I think that's important to everyone. So we're anxious to see how this is going to roll out in the future and we want to make sure that we are working on the ground with the government to make sure that this is maximized as much as possible."
In addition, the Competition Bureau and Competition Tribunal receiving $130 million to "investigate, prevent, and combat anti-competitive business practices."
The National Strategy, Currie says, is a great start to addressing food security, but explained in order for it to be a success, it needs to involve more than one federal department.
"When you look at the business of agriculture and what it encompasses, it's not just the Ministry of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada that we deal with. We deal with Environment and Climate Change Canada, we deal with Natural Resources, Transportation is a key ministry that we deal with. Of course, through this announcement, we're going to have to have several contributions from other industries like Infrastructure, where much of this money hopefully will be coming from as we go forward. But we also need to make sure that we're in touch with Immigration and Labor because Labor is a key part to doing all this and we need to make sure that we continue to have not only job opportunities for Canadians, but have those jobs filled. So that's very important.
And as we move into further production, we're still going to be relying on our trade, so Global Affairs Canada is going to be very important there. Certainly Finance and the Treasury Board are going to have to oversee much of this.
So it's a multiple ministry opportunity or multiple ministry involvement that's going to be required to coordinate how we move this strategy going forward."
And all the investments announced will take time before Canadian see any real benefit from them.
"Certainly setting the goal and the target of what this strategy can achieve is important. We just have to make sure that we're not rushing to it and don't do it right or have it fail. That's why we continue to tell the government that farmers and ranchers across this country need to be on the ground and at the tables with the government discussing program design and program delivery timelines that make realistic sense." he said.
CFA says the agriculture and agri-food sector contributes nearly $150 billion annually to Canada's GDP and supports over 2.3 million jobs.
