Below are the spoken comments of Dr. Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute, to the The House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food on November 3, 2025:

The problem I would ask you to try to consider predates my career and may be as old as Confederation. How can we create a policy and regulatory environment that encourages agri-food innovation and keeps the value of our farm products within Canada?

When I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s I watched as farmers tore both their hair and their crops out because they couldn’t find processing markets – huge amounts of our summer crops spoiled every year.

That was the era of the first North American free trade agreement and there was an economic logic at work given that California producers could generally out-compete Canadian producers about 11 months of the year.

Today, this logic is changing again. The current trade war and climate change is disrupting the paradigm of the last three decades…Meanwhile, innovations are giving the Canadian sector the tools it needs to produce things differently.

Robotic milkers and smart tractors are giving our producers the tools to produce more food with less inputs. New strawberry varieties that bloom year-round combined with low-cost LED lighting mean we can have fresh strawberries in the middle of winter anywhere in Canada. Just two weeks ago, I ate mozzarella cheese that contains dairy proteins that emerged out of a brewing facility rather than a cow’s udder.

Innovation needs to lie at the heart of our food system, and we must realize our food system is intrinsic to our security as a nation.

If we get policy and regulations right, we can create a system that is far more robust and sustainable, offers healthy nutrition to Canadians that is more affordable, and we can capture far more value for the raw products that we produce.

To achieve this, I would like you to consider four broad policy areas.

Number one must be regulatory reform between the provincial and the federal governments. In British Columbia, for example, agricultural land cannot be used for food processing facilities unless 50% of the food being processed is sourced locally. This means that it will never be possible to build a blueberry jam factory on a blueberry farm in BC, since the sugar or other ingredients needs to be sourced from outside of Canada.

Second must be training. We need to draw upon Canada’s exceptional network of post-secondary institutes to create a much more ambitious and invigorated training platform that attracts the best and brightest minds in our country into agri- food. For too long, our robotics students have dreamed of working for NASA when there are better jobs available for them in Leamington.

Luckily, we have made progress and I am thrilled that just this year AFI has received $16M from ISED to create the Sustainable Food Systems For Canada innovation training platform, so thank you for this great start.

Third, we must de-risk private investment in the space. Agri-food tech is not like traditional fin-tech or even green energy, since the speed of development in agriculture is constrained to growing seasons and biological cycles. Investments in agri-food are relatively unattractive to venture capitalists and other vehicles of private equity because the ROI is simply too slow . But we can correct this by helping de-risk investment perhaps by doing things like offering write-offs for capital gains if those capital gains might be re-invested in domestic startups.

Finally, there’s a need to better align our research councils to industry needs so that our research engine better helps directly solve the problems of the agri-food sector. We know Canada is great at research and lousy at commercialization. One reason for that is a relative disconnect between research councils and industry needs.

I believe that if we do these four things – straighten out the regulatory environment, attract the best minds to the sector, de-risk investment, and better align research councils to industry needs – we will have the opportunity to position Canada as the world’s pre-eminent powerhouse when it comes to agri- food innovation.

Royal Bank of Canada agrees and calls investments in the sector “Canada’s moonshot”.

Farm Credit Canada describes this as our generational opportunity.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today.