Canadian Agri-Food Resilience

Anyone who works in or knows the agriculture and agri-food sector would recognize that there are many challenges and risks but also opportunities and rewards. Although agriculture has always been characterized by wide-ranging uncontrollable risks – weather, pests, diseases, competitors, and markets – the growing commercialization and sophistication of production, processing, and marketing have created an evolving and complex environment for decision making. 

The past three years introduced significantly increased risk pressures on the Canadian agri-food industry and its supply chains, with the multi-year impacts of COVID, the war in Ukraine, and increasingly more difficult supply chain issues (such as the availability of ships and containers, the blockage of the Suez Canal, damaged or destroyed transportation infrastructure, and labour shortages or strikes). 

For a healthy and resilient Canadian agri-food ecosystem to thrive, it is critical that the industry’s complex and dynamic supply chains function effectively and efficiently both inside and outside of Canada. It is critical that these supply chains be resilient and adaptable in a world of increasing risk. Stakeholders need to be willing and able to navigate the agri-food risk landscape and develop the appropriate responses to changing conditions. Responsive policies, programs, actions, and strategies built through consultation and collaboration are required to create and maintain a thriving agri-food sector. As we will see, a new level of shared situational awareness — sophisticated comprehension of what is going on, what is important, as well as future implications — will support and maintain Canada’s enviable position in this sector. 

Industry stakeholders are familiar with defining agri-food system health through vitality and stability, but most generally understand risk through the lens of single, discrete crises. Awareness of the impacts and effects of issues such as geopolitical tensions, human-induced climate change, and pandemics tends to be considered in isolation. However, 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 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. All stakeholders in the agri-food eco-system – producers, governments, suppliers and marketers, financial services, academics – would benefit from information on how to recognize, analyze, and respond to this new era. 

The objective of this report is to present an approach to enhance overall agri-food and supply chain resilience, an approach that adopts the principles of structured decision making (SDM). To develop this approach, pork and greenhouse vegetables were chosen as commodities to be representative of agri-food commodities in Canada which would serve to reveal issues, concerns, and opportunities generally experienced in other agri-food commodities. 

Representatives were consulted from other commodities including beef, row crops, landscape and horticultural sectors. 

The report presents the first phase of the development of a crisis management toolbox (CMT) for the Canadian agri-food sector. The toolbox is an innovative integration of six tools that build upon one another sequentially, and in the aggregate, deliver a powerful decision support process/product. The purpose of the various tools that comprise the CMT is to enhance agri-food industry resilience while providing a platform for increased supply chain efficiencies. This report presents the first phase in the development and application of an SDM process. The CMT provides a solid foundation for developing options and recommendations. Building upon participatory consultations and case studies, these tools aid in the identification and visualization of system-level disruptive forces, their dynamic relationships, their scales of operation, and quantitative impacts on the system. The tools in our CMT are: 

(1) participatory consultations; 

(2) case studies; 

(3) vulnerability mapping (VM); 

(4) force-disruptor-vulnerability mapping (FDVM); 

(5) risk topography visualization (RTV); and 

(6) foresight analysis.

All these tools operate within a structured decision making framework. These tools aid in the identification and visualization of system-level disruptive forces, their dynamic relationships, their scales of operation and quantitative impacts on the system allowing for effective adaptation opportunities and optimization of resource allocation critical to successful long-term planning and policy making. 

Most importantly, the CMT provides farmers and other stakeholders with the roadmap to build informed, forward-looking, and insightful short-, medium-, and long-term plans for their operations, including farm succession and transition plans, which are critical for the stability and resilience of the Canadian agri-food ecosystem. 

By using the tools presented here along with the SDM principles, agri-food system stakeholders can bring their concerns or insights into developing new policies as well as reviewing and revising existing policies using qualitative and quantitative data collected across the specific commodity’s supply chain. Likewise, public sector policy makers and private sector decision makers will have deeper insights to better inform appropriate response strategies and actions to current and emerging risks, roles, and responsibilities.

This will enable better performance monitoring of response actions. The approach presented in this report helps to create informed resilience strategies. 

Download the full report here.