Cut regulations and Canada will be world’s second-largest food exporter, Croplife says

OTTAWA — Canada has a lot of potential as an agri-food powerhouse, but it’s falling behind. That’s because Canada came up with a great idea that other countries are using and not us.

Regulations in many countries boxed in how countries developed and tested their research. Then Canada pioneered the outcome-based evaluation of new food and agricultural products that’s in increasingly wide usage today by other countries, CropLife Canada vice president Dennis Prouse told Canada’s House of Commons standing committee on agriculture last month. The Canadian idea is that as long as the product is safe, we don’t need to worry so much about the process and don’t need to regulate that so much. That idea freed up a lot of countries to get their product to market faster.

Countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Brazil, Argentina and the United States settled on roughly similar regulatory regimes around the Canadian idea. But bogged down by our regulatory focus, Canada hasn’t joined them, particularly on the contentious issue of genetically-modified organisms. While the science agrees that they’re safe, they nevertheless run into more regulatory oversight in Canada than they do elsewhere.

The upshot is that innovation goes elsewhere else, argued Prouse, who represents Canadian manufacturers, developers and distributors of modern plant breeding products to provide farmers the tools to be more productive.
New varieties of crops developed in Canada end up in other jurisdictions, where the path to market is clearer, faster and more certain, Prouse said. And once those crops hit a critical mass, there’s processing opportunities. “These are value-added products that could be grown and processed in Canada, giving benefits to both Canadian consumers and our export markets.”

It’s low-hanging fruit for government, he added, since it can be as easy as changing policy and doesn’t need legislative or even regulatory changes.
If Canada joined other countries in freeing up the process it might not sound like a big deal but it can be huge. The standardization of the shipping container in the mid-20th century transformed shipping. Unloading ships alone was once as much as 50 per cent of the industry’s total costs. Nowadays many economists assume shipping costs are zero, because it makes the math simpler and it’s basically correct.

Canada also set a goal of being the second-largest agri-food exporter in the world, Prouse told the standing committee. “We are number five. That’s simply not good enough for a country with Canada’s potential. The economic challenge post-COVID-19 is going to be making Canada’s critical industries more competitive, and agriculture and food is at the top of that list.”

The world’s top four agri-food exporters in order are the U.S., China, The Netherlands and Brazil.