It looks like we will see different symbols on food packaging soon, telling us whether a food product at the grocery store has too much fat, sugar or sodium.
 
Health Canada is likely going forward with a policy requiring front-of-package nutrition symbols on foods high in saturated fat, sugars and sodium. It will provide clear, easy-to-read labels.
 
But one part of Health Canada’s plan is a head-scratcher.
 
The threshold that Health Canada intends to apply is quite simple. For prepared or processed foods and those intended solely for children one to four years of age, it’s 15 per cent of daily values (DV). This means that if a product’s serving exceeds 15 per cent of the maximum daily allowance for saturated fat, sugar or sodium, a label will be prominently placed on the package for consumers to see right away. For prepackaged meals and dishes, the threshold is 30 per cent.
 
The policy appears to make sense. It’s hard to argue against more clarity, more transparency and, as a result, better consumer health.
 
But things get murky when we start looking at the list of exemptions. Many products will be exempt from this policy. For example, products at a farmers’ market, products not sold directly to consumers, non-processed raw single-ingredient meat and fish products, all dairy products, and eggs. The list includes technical, practical and health-related exemptions, with 16 categories in total.
 
What’s surprising is that ground beef and pork aren’t exempt. This means that, in a few months, ground beef and pork, two unprocessed, natural and affordable animal protein sources that many consumers eat daily, will be labelled as having too much saturated fat. Meanwhile, dairy products, which arguably contain at least as much saturated fat, are exempt.
 
Some sources believe the incredibly powerful dairy lobby provided enough evidence and scientific data to Health Canada to suggest that saturated fats found in dairy products are different, and healthier. That may be the case, but Health Canada certainly has some explaining to do, considering how it butchered dairy products with the latest food guide, released a few years ago.
 
The lack of consistency is mind-blowing.
 
Beef and pork do exceed thresholds set by Health Canada – when products are raw, not cooked. However, few people will eat these products raw. When cooked, saturated fat levels are normally below the Health Canada threshold.
 
What’s critical here is protein affordability. While retail prices for beef and pork specialty cuts have skyrocketed in recent years, ground beef and pork have been relatively affordable. Almost 50 per cent of beef consumed in Canada is ground beef. Still, Health Canada intends to slap warning labels on these products consumed by more than 90 per cent of Canadians just as our food inflation rate hits about 10 per cent.
 
Discriminating against these two products despite other exemptions is likely driven by elitist nutritional ideologies fostered by some out-of-touch bureaucrats. It often feels as though the federal government wants to save consumers from themselves. Such a theoretical narrative might go over well in Ottawa, but not so much at the average Canadian kitchen table.
 
The beef and pork industries are not only important to our economy, they are also part of many Canadian traditions and are embedded in our culinary DNA. As we try to figure out how to lead healthier lifestyles, warning Canadians that these unprocessed food staples are now dangerous to their health doesn’t make sense. Dietary recommendations, like most things, should be applied in moderation.
 
Canada will become one of the first countries in the world to have a front-of-package policy targeting single-ingredient products. Many other countries with this type of labelling haven’t required single-ingredient products to have warning labels.
 
At the core of the policy is the intent to help consumers make better, healthier choices at the grocery store, particularly when processed foods are involved. Requiring ground beef and pork to be labelled suggests that the spirit of the policy got lost despite the several meetings Health Canada had with stakeholders.
 
Health Canada is purposefully aiming at two very important food staples that Canadians have been consuming for centuries. It makes no sense. These products need to be exempt from new front-of-package labelling rules.
 
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

Events unfolding around the world are creating the perfect playbook for a global food security crisis: climate change, a pandemic, war and nationalistic hoarding are all factors.

Climate has been affecting agriculture for a very long time. And the unpredictable nature of severe weather patterns is making the lives of our farmers more difficult. Growing conditions have become anything but predictable in Canada and elsewhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic has weakened supply chains, making logistics more expensive when transporting food. Delays and how the virus has desynchronized the global economy have also impacted costs.

Commodity prices were rising before the invasion of Ukraine in late February, but Russia’s assault has pushed all prices to record levels. Corn is up almost 20 per cent, and wheat is up more than 30 per cent since the invasion. Soybeans, oats and canola are all more expensive than just a few months ago.

The conflict is impacting one of the world’s most significant agri-food production regions. Ukraine produces enough to feed almost 400 million people yearly. That’s greater than the population of the United States.

So idling an economy like Ukraine’s will have consequences. Some experts believe the world has 10 weeks of wheat supplies left due to the Russian invasion. Almost 40 nations get at least 50 per cent of their grain supplies from Ukraine.

For the longest time, global food security was very much a food distribution problem: how to get enough food to every region. We produced enough food but making it available in some regions was a challenge. Now, we won’t have enough food for everyone on Earth.

Early reports suggested that the number of hungry and malnourished people could increase by 100 million due to food shortages following the Ukrainian crisis. But according to the United Nation’s World Food Programme, that number has risen to 220 million in 43 countries.

And some countries are halting trade – as Indonesia did temporarily with palm oil and India did with wheat – which will only lead to more famine.

Russia, affected by many sanctions, now blames the world for the planet’s heightened food crisis. That’s like blaming the fire department for a burning building. But sanctions against Russia undoubtedly have an impact on global food security.

North America, however, is in a food security bubble. It’s not easy for us to appreciate what’s going on around the world. We find most shelves at our grocery stores full of food. Few of us can understand what other parts of the world are experiencing. But the world isn’t in a good place.

While food security is everyone’s business, the Canadian government appears to be living in a vacuum when it comes to agricultural productivity. Canadian farmers face the most expensive seeding season in history, and reports suggest that some farmers have opted not to plant this year due to extremely high input costs. Some tax relief or additional assistance with crop insurance would have been helpful.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve US$500 million in aid for the farm sector in a bid to encourage U.S. wheat producers to double-crop their fields.

But the Biden administration also temporarily allowed E15 gasoline, which uses 15 per cent ethanol blend, to be sold this summer. It usually can’t be sold from June to September – a measure intended to help reduce gas prices. So food appears to be less of a priority than fuel.

Food plays a central part in our democracies. Hungry societies will eventually break down. World order relies on highly functioning, democratic food systems.

Canada must address the issue of farming productivity to increase yields to help the rest of the world. With our many protectionist measures, Canada lacks the vision needed at a time when the world needs Canadian farming more than ever. Fertilizer affordability is one component.

The planet is coming to realize how capable Russian President Vladimir Putin is at hurting as many people as possible. By invading Ukraine, Putin is weaponizing food. The conflict is crippling the port of Odesa, so Ukraine can’t get its food out of the country. Allowing food to flow out of that region should be a priority.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

What is becoming clear is that the energy economy and the carbon tech sector have also become a “new
buffalo” for Indigenous communities

ties are becoming heavily involved in carbon capture and storage projects in Alberta, capitalizing on developments that would see carbon emissions from industrial sites get buried deep underground.
Indigenous groups have obtained ownership stakes for two proposed carbon removal projects, the Open Access Wabamun Carbon Hub and Wolf Midstream Sequestration Hub, thus giving these communities more of a financial interest in projects and potential for reliable new revenue sources.
This is a positive development as it demonstrates how the private sector can drive down carbon emissions through technological innovation.
The involvement of many Indigenous groups demonstrates that First Nations and Metis want to get involved in the game and to re-build their economies. Indigenous individuals and communities are just as ambitious, enterprising, and entrepreneurial as any. The problem is how the federal government historically intervened in Indigenous economies and stifled initiative on reserves.
Negative stereotypes about Indigenous people and their work ethic have always existed, showing a lack of awareness of how past Canadian governments limited Indigenous engagement in the economy.
For many Indigenous peoples, it is not as simple as just “pulling up their bootstraps” and getting to work because there are real systemic barriers to economic development on reserves. Especially land ownership restrictions imposed by the Indian Act that limit Indigenous access to capital or policies that necessitate the excessive involvement of the Indigenous Affairs bureaucracy in economic projects.
There are few jobs in these communities and little opportunity for entrepreneurial and job-creating activity.
In 1993, Helen Buckley – a Canadian economist who worked in the Department of Finance – released a scholarly book called From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare: Why Indian Policy Failed in the Prairie Provinces.
She documented how Indigenous communities went from being self-reliant and interdependent to compliant and dependent on the government in the 1870s through deliberate government neglect and policy design.
Their economies went from being based on casual wage work and reliable trapping income towards reliance on social assistance, with the government encouraging people to remain on reserves lacking viable economies.
The Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC) was created in 2019 to provide loan guarantees for natural resource projects. According to Alberta Indigenous Relations, this corporation has backstopped more than $160 million in Indigenous investments. And the AIOC recently expanded the projects they back to include major agriculture, transportation, telecommunications, and proposed carbon capture and storage facilities.
Backstopping loans for First Nations to engage in energy and carbon capture projects across the West and beyond represents one big way Indigenous communities can express their innate but repressed ambition and entrepreneurial drive.
In 2011, Indigenous scholar Blair Stonechild referred to post-secondary education as the “new buffalo” for Indigenous peoples. He meant, of course, that with the decline of the bison herds on the Prairies, education now symbolized the new hope for Indigenous prosperity and livelihood.
He is certainly right, but what is becoming clear for Canada is that the energy economy and the carbon tech sector have also become a “new buffalo” for Indigenous communities.
Carbon capture and storage hubs located close to First Nations and Metis communities like the Open Access Wabamun Carbon Hub and Wolf Midstream Sequestration Hub could become tickets out of manufactured poverty, creating wealth for these communities while reducing the emissions impact for Canada.

Joseph Quesnel is a Nova Scotia-based consultant with the Canadian Energy Centre. Joseph is Quebec Metis by heritage.

There was a clash between reality and the federal Liberal Twitter account last week.
The self-congratulatory tweet claimed Liberals have been “making life more affordable” since 2015.
When Canadians look at gas prices, grocery store receipts and mortgage payments, that claim might raise eyebrows.
Does life feel more affordable now than it did seven years ago?
Here’s what the numbers say.
The price of food jumped by nine per cent over the year, the cost of homes skyrocketed, and many people can’t afford to fill their cars to get to work.
In 2015, the price of gasoline in Vancouver was $1.02 per litre. Now it’s more than doubled, costing $2.20 per litre. That’s more than $240 to fill a pickup.
Taxes are a huge factor in gas prices. While global unrest increases the price of oil and a lack of pipelines chokes supply, taxes make it worse.
In Vancouver, 75 cents per litre of the pump price is taxes, including two carbon taxes.
In 2015, there was no federal carbon tax. Now, it’s 11 cents per litre of gasoline. People pay the carbon tax on home heating and the carbon tax is also on diesel. That means we pay more for groceries and everything else delivered to us on a truck.
The feds try to explain away that reality by pointing to rebates, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer has concluded the carbon tax is a “net loss” for most families.
That analysis doesn’t include a second federal carbon tax embedded in fuel standards that’ll be in place by Christmas this year. It’s estimated to add 11 cents to the price of a litre of gas by 2030.
Within the next eight years, the two carbon taxes will cost about 50 cents per litre of gasoline.
Taxes are making life less affordable now, but Canadians should be worried about future affordability because today’s deficits are tomorrow’s taxes.
In 2015, the federal debt was $616 billion. By the end of this year, the debt will have doubled to $1.2 trillion.
Every month, taxpayers are paying more than $2 billion in interest on the debt. By 2025, the PBO expects interest charges to exceed $40 billion per year, more than double the cost at the onset of COVID-19.
The cost to buy a home has jumped since 2015.
Back then, the cost of a detached home in London, Ont. was $282,229. Today, those same homes cost more than $793,000.
Deficit spending has made inflation worse, which in turn has prompted domestic investor groups to park their money in real estate to hedge against inflation, adding to the rising cost of homes.
And the feds have been slow to demand good results in exchange for taxpayers’ money transferred to city halls that are strangling new home builds.
Simon Fraser University research shows a Vancouver home requires 18 inspections and five more for the garage. The city’s building permit fees are also twice the average rate of U.S. cities.
Why did Ottawa hand more than $3.9 million to the City of Vancouver in 2021-22 through the Community Building Fund when that city hall is making it nearly impossible to build homes?
Then there’s inflation.
In 2015, inflation was 1.1 per cent. That means things like new tires or a pound of apples cost about one per cent more than they had a year before.
Today, inflation is at 6.7 per cent. The Trudeau government is making inflation worse with big deficits because the Bank of Canada prints money to buy government debt, creating more dollars chasing fewer goods, which intensifies inflation.
A 6.7 per cent inflation rate is the highest since 1991.
Interestingly, it was about a year after that high inflation that Bill Clinton won the White House with the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The top issue in Canada today is resoundingly: “Affordability, stupid.”
Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director and Kris Sims is the B.C. Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Parents of toddlers are concerned about baby formula shortages due to a combination of factors.
A major recall in the United States affecting the top manufacturer of baby formula, coupled with supply chain challenges, has made things difficult for parents.
In the U.S., some parents are driving hours just to get the right product for their baby. In more than six states, over 50 per cent of retail stores are out of stock.
Breast milk banks are getting organized, and many organizations are helping desperate American parents. If someone is looking for a product for their child, they will find it, but it may not be the product their baby is accustomed to and that, of course, can be a problem for nervous parents.
But the big problem is the recall that occurred on Feb. 17.
Abbott Laboratories, the largest baby formula manufacturer in the U.S., voluntarily recalled its products manufactured in Sturgis, Mich., and closed the facility following reports that four infants had fallen ill from bacterial infections. Two toddlers allegedly died after having consumed formula produced in the plant.
A whistleblower report was submitted last year to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about what was going on at the plant. Abbott denies everything, based on evidence the company collected itself. Still, the plant in Michigan could be shut for another two months, if not more.
Regulators would typically expedite the opening of such an important plant. We saw this during COVID-19 with major meat plants, but the relationship with the FDA and Abbott is clearly fractured and messy.
When only three companies manufacture about 98 per cent of what’s consumed in the country, things will escalate when a recall occurs. The baby formula market is not that profitable since birth rates have been dropping in the U.S. When a market is shrinking, getting new players is challenging.
It’s not the first time baby formula has made international headlines. In 2008, China had a baby formula scandal when a top manufacturer opted to add melamine – a chemical used in plastic – to their baby formula. Thousands of toddlers were hospitalized, although few actually died. For months, Chinese leadership hid the scandal from the public because it didn’t want any bad publicity while it was hosting the Summer Olympics that year. This became one of the most significant food safety scandals in history.
And now the U.S. is dealing with its own baby formula headaches.
In Canada, the situation might be a little different. First, demand for baby formula is typically higher in most American states than in Canada. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the U.S., about 56 per cent of infants are breastfed up to the age of six months. In Canada, that rate is above 80 per cent, according to the International Journal for Equity in Health. So reliance on baby formula in the United States is more acute.
Health Canada has temporarily allowed infant formula brands from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany to be imported into Canada. This measure will help put many parents at ease. Still, most of the baby formula consumed in Canada is imported, so any hiccups outside of Canada can impact our supplies.
But most Canadians don’t know that Canada is home to a large baby formula plant. In Kingston, Ont., Canada Royal Milk, owned by China’s Feihe International, built a plant in 2017. It’s the largest baby formula plant in Canada by far. However, all its products are shipped to China. The plant uses Canadian cow and goat milk.
This is troubling for anyone who understands how the Canadian dairy sector works.
Not only is the production of that cow milk partially subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, but dairy farmers also have expensive government-sanctioned quotas intended to serve Canadians only. Supply management is about feeding ourselves and nobody else.
Supply management is considered one of the most protectionist policies in Canadian agriculture. But we produce baby formula for China almost exclusively. Something isn’t right.
Selling to China isn’t really the problem. After all, China’s melamine scare in 2008 made Canadian dairy products all the more attractive. It’s hard to blame an industry for capitalizing on an opportunity. But this dairy is Canadian.
To get Canadians to buy into our supply management regime and to produce what we need in Canada, Canadian dairy farmers have long argued we can’t ship milk abroad and grow the Asian market. Since dairy farmers have no incentive to grow any markets, we’ve allowed a Chinese-owned company to invest in Canada, only to ship our food back to China.
Subsidizing and protecting our milk production to serve other markets isn’t what supply management was designed to do when it was implemented more than 50 years ago. The milk sold to Canada Royal Milk should not only be off quota, but the facility should also be Canadian owned and operated so some of the focus would be on the Canadian market.
So Canadians are still reliant on imports, despite the existence of Canada Royal Milk.
Most ironic, due to trade barriers on both sides, the plant is only 30 km away from the American border but can’t ship products to the U.S.
For Canadian consumers, having access to Canadian-made baby formula would be reassuring, but dairy farmers just don’t think about the market that way. Money is money, and who’s being fed is totally secondary.
This is Canada’s true baby formula problem.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

Susan Martinuk Troy Media

The coronavirus pandemic has accomplished what a multitude of government reports could not – that is, to draw Canadians’ attention to a faltering health-care system characterized by a chronic shortage of beds, overflowing emergency departments, and limited numbers of surgical personnel and operating suites.

The flaws have been there for decades, but willful blindness on the part of our politicians has successfully kept systemic change at bay and patients on wait lists for medical care.

Most recently, media stories have focused on a scarcity of physicians.

A provincial registry in Nova Scotia lists 88,300 patients waiting for a family doctor, with 30,000 in Halifax alone. That number rises to 175,000 for all the Atlantic provinces. The situation is no better elsewhere. More than one million Ontarians, 780,000 British Columbians, and 25 per cent of Quebeckers are without a primary care physician. Nationwide, the number is about five million, or 15 per cent of our population.

The numbers and the consequences are even grimmer when considering access to specialist care.

In Ontario, a family doctor sounded the alarm when a referral to a neurologist elicited a response stating there was a 4.5-year wait for care. In Alberta, one patient paid for his own MRI to get a prompt diagnosis only to find out that access to treatment was years away — there were 1,803 patients ahead of him on the specialist referral list. No wonder a 2016 study of health care in 11 wealthy OECD countries found that Canada had the worst access to specialist care.

The consequences of waiting cannot be underestimated. SecondStreet.org has identified 11,581 patients who died while waiting for surgeries, procedures or scans in 2020-2021. Since April 2018, that number is 26,875.

Even more frightening is that access to medical care will get far worse before it gets better. The numbers quoted above are pre-COVID, and the health and well-being of medical personnel have been ravaged by a two-year pandemic. The limited number of physicians we have is getting fed up and burnt out.

A November 2021 survey by the Canadian Medical Association shows that 53 percent of physicians and medical students have experienced high levels of burnout. It also found that 46 per cent of physicians were considering reducing their clinical work over the next two years. Similarly, a 2018 study found that almost 40 per cent of our doctors will be over the age of 55 and closing in on retirement within three to five years.

The evidence could not be clearer or overwhelming: Canada needs more doctors.

There are three ways to fix this problem.

The first is to increase enrollments and capacities at Canada’s medical schools. Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently announced 450 new post-secondary positions in that province’s six medical schools. Other provinces should follow suit.

Enrollments have declined since a controversial 1992 report wrongly suggested that health-care costs were skyrocketing because of too many doctors. That reduced medical school enrollments for two decades and Canadians have been paying for that mistake ever since as the numbers of graduates declined. It’s time for enrollments to match public needs.

Secondly, doctors are like everyone else in that they need jobs when they graduate. Annual surveys by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons show that up to 40 per cent of newly-certified specialists can’t find a job in a country that desperately needs specialist physicians. As a result, many are forced to leave the country.

The third way is through immigration and attracting doctors trained in other countries. It may seem like a simple solution, but the process is slow. Medical and governmental regulatory bodies do not appear to have the capability to test, monitor and give accreditation to more than a handful of the estimated 5,000 educated doctors now in Canada who wish to be licensed.

In 2020, the B.C. government announced that foreign-trained doctors could become “associate physicians” and carry out duties under licensed doctors to earn their full accreditation. Two years later, not one physician has been registered in the program.

Where are the health-care planners in all of this? Why is Canada heavily subsidizing the education and training of physicians only to have them leave because of a lack of job opportunities while Canadians remain underserved and are paying to recruit doctors from other countries?

It’s time to deal with Canada’s shortage of doctors, but that will take coordination and effort on behalf of governments, academia and regulatory bodies. While the chances of such a collaboration are minimal, it remains our only hope to obtain/maintain even the most basic health care.

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the book, Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.

One of the big-ticket items in the most recent federal budget was the new NDP-approved dental care program. Since oral health falls under provincial jurisdiction, the announcement raises several questions as to the application of this program across the country.

Expanding access to dental care is a goal we can all get behind, especially when we consider that nearly 20 percent of Canadians see cost as a barrier in this area. But the situation will not improve if the funds are used inefficiently. Certain guidelines, if followed, would increase the chances of achieving the best possible outcome.

First, for the sake of the health of our public finances, if the federal government is to introduce a permanent spending program like this, it must also cut its expenditures elsewhere by at least an equivalent amount. Failing to consider the extra strain such a program will impose on already heavily taxed Canadian families is irresponsible.

Moreover, the federal government must let the provinces organize the delivery of dental care and the distribution of funds. Not only is health care a provincial responsibility, but the provinces are in the best position to answer the needs of their population and adjust the program as those needs change over time. In other words, the dental care program must not take away the provinces’ ability to innovate in elaborating their public policies just because the financing comes from the federal government.

And speaking of elaboration, the dental care program should be modelled after Quebec’s current drug insurance plan. Specifically, this means having the government cover the cost, or part of the cost, of select dental services for those who do not already have dental insurance. Indeed, those who already have a good dental coverage plan, as many Canadians do, often through their employer, should not be forced to abandon it in favour of a government-run plan. This way, just as for prescription drugs, the province’s entire population would have dental insurance without limiting choice.

Including dentists and dental hygienists in the elaboration of the government-run program could also ensure that it is well-adapted to the realities of their profession. Surely, maintaining their professional autonomy is of the utmost importance.

It is worth mentioning that improving the accessibility of dental care can be achieved without increased spending. Introducing public policies that instead increase efficiency can also lead to greater access to health services.

A concrete example of such a policy is the autonomy that was finally granted to dental hygienists in Quebec in 2020 to allow them to work within their own clinics without the supervision of a dentist. Quebec was one of the last provinces in the country to do so, with Prince Edward Island alone now still prohibiting independent practice for these professionals. Entrepreneurship has therefore been encouraged across the country, likely reducing the cost of routine cleaning and thereby improving access to preventive treatments.

Achieving more with the immense amount of money we already spend on our provincial health care systems needs to be explored before resorting to increased spending. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, can serve as models, as they have less costly universal health care systems that offer greater dental coverage than Canadian provinces currently do.

At the end of the day, we must avoid nationalizing dental care and instead provide coverage for those who can’t afford it. Creating a government-run monopoly would lead to the same problems we see elsewhere in our health care systems – long wait lists, shortages, an overabundance of bureaucracy – none of which will help improve the accessibility of this important service.

Maria Lily Shaw is an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute.

Food supply chain hangovers due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have resulted in questions about the global nature of our food systems.

Some suggest we need to deglobalize and refocus our energy on making most economies around the world food sovereign, including Canada’s.

Given what the world is about to face this year, with major famine as millions experience acute hunger, it’s hard to argue against such a claim. But global trade over the years, especially for Canada, has been nothing short of a godsend and brushing any of it to the side would be to our detriment.

We should be clear on one fundamental reality: The world is still all about the United States and China. Everyone else adjusts along the way, including Canada. Thirty-five per cent of China’s exports go to the United States, and China is also America’s leading customer.

So Canada matters very little in the grand scheme of things, at least right now. Still, the world is in deep trouble.

About 15 per cent of all calories on Earth come from wheat, with corn covering a lot of calorific ground as well. With Ukraine out of the supply mix, coupled with sanctions against Russia, the global wheat deficit this year will be a significant challenge given that 25 per cent of grain exports come from that region. We’re going to be short on wheat, corn, barley and many other commodities.

By the time we’re done with 2022, it’s likely that more than 100 million additional people will experience either famine or acute hunger, something the world has never seen before.

The planet operates under a 90-day production cycle of agricultural commodities. Canada’s contribution, along with the U.S. and parts of Europe, occurs in the fall.

With U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent ethanol mandate, almost 40 per cent of the U.S. corn crop is used for ethanol, not food. In Canada, it’s about 10 per cent. The food-for-fuel obsession is back, despite the looming crisis.

Canada will be fine when it comes to food access, but food will become more expensive. Poor nations always lose access to their food supply first, while richer nations like Canada will secure food supplies by paying more. Poor countries have no capacity to store calories at all.

Germany, typically a big buyer of Ukrainian commodities, stated that retail food prices could increase by as much as 50 per cent this year. Commodity traders are already buying and even hoarding what they can get to secure supplies needed for the next several months.

China is basically the only nation that could bridge the calorie gap. China’s significance in all of this can’t be underscored enough.

Of some of the challenges we face, fertilizer access is certainly key. These critical inputs for farmers cost on average about US$1,500 a tonne, five times the cost 12 months ago. Farmers need fertilizers to produce crops, but the market is controlled by a handful of multinational companies –some of them are in Canada – that supply-manage their products to artificially boost prices. This needs to stop.

We’re also paying for years of bashing HYPERLINK “https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001pVbLFpO6eF9Rdwy9PGLVgKag1r3zO_LzfDm1v2I0-rzE-xa6j-9Bv1cY9ZofG94eWWYVgQ5-ET6xtQpgVwUrLowY7mD0WYFZImTVaE7ONFmjpDoQd_Aru85dqrtZbodHhuFX4gOo72fexVT5JrG3_vEIcviFukfJcmaBEAQBTzN4LOCCqAay7BpYCHrRfzhhPbgZRgKDML_FnIXHTOO7tQ==&c=4FcbRNzuffScUkZ7pO1pVF2XBXGdzKEZHoxWSBl_j2L-NjIzjp9OMA==&ch=nNWZvv18_XjqCGOh-pfDufZVas9A5GXp_2hDMKA1yJs2210LqYqZpQ==” \t “_blank” generic engineering in the media by groups that have used fear to put forward an organic-centric diet for affluent city dwellers.

Additionally, groups have recklessly lobbied city councils and provincial governments to ban the use of chemicals that make agriculture more cost-effective. The approval process for new traits for new crops can take years in many developed countries, including Canada.

Agriculture is and will always be about technologies. Those foolish fanatics who are anti-genetically modified organisms will have to accept that.

And now, many people are talking about deglobalizing our food economy. Deglobalization occurs when the economic interdependence between nations declines.

For Canada, this would be a problem. Canada is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of land, with fewer than 39 million people. Deglobalization essentially means Canadians will face a reduction in their standard of living. Almost 60 per cent of our wealth comes from trade. Trade also makes our food more diverse and affordable. But this doesn’t mean our approach to trade doesn’t need fixing – it certainly does.

High-functioning food systems aren’t immune to destructive forces like climate change or a global pandemic. We know that. Tyrants like Russian President Vladimir Putin can only make matters worse.

A new globalization agenda would require that nations adhere to acceptable humanitarian conduct to participate in a global economy.

Nations would also need to ensure farmers aren’t held hostage by the powerful companies controlling the fertilizer industry. That needs to change, and Canada can do something about it.

Canada will also need to make our agriculture more efficient and more productive through a solid food autonomy strategy. The only province that has a food autonomy strategy is Quebec.

Canada needs a pathway to produce more food in an open economy, offering us better access and affordable prices while growing our agriculture through trade in a sustainable matter.

A comprehensive strategy would include sustainable water practices and the use of renewable energy to support production. If we do things right in Canada, in a few decades we could end up supplying water-scarce California with food rather than the other way around.

Bold thinking requires an audacious strategy. Canada can do better since we have so much to offer.

Global trade has worked for the betterment of the world. But attaining more resiliency is still a work in progress, whether we like it or not.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.