Canada’s food and agriculture sectors are falling behind key competitors in capital investment, public research spending and variety development, a House of Commons committee was told two weeks ago.
During public hearings on Canadian agricultural competitiveness by the Commons agriculture committee May 12, senior academics and researchers painted a bleak portrait.
Larry Martin, senior fellow at the Guelph, Ont.-based George Morris Centre, told MPs that because of a lack of food industry investment, Canadian food sector productivity per dollar of investment is barely more than half of productivity in the United States.
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For seven of the past nine years, Canadian food companies invested less than depreciation writeoffs.
“In other words, our food industry capital base is declining,” said Martin. “In the same period of time, the worst year (in the U.S.) is that they invested 20 percent more than depreciation in their food industry. What this means is that we are not getting innovation.”
University of Lethbridge economist Kurt Klein warned that under-funding of basic public research also is a competitiveness problem.
In the early 1990s, the federal government turned to private sector research investment to replace public funding. Much of that has gone into crops that have intellectual property protection on variety improvement or on projects that have short-term commercialization possibilities.
Klein said the federal government should re-examine its financial commitment to agriculture and consolidate the agricultural-related research being done in dozens of public institutions, including universities, provincial agencies and the National Research Council.
