National security concerns have taken centre stage as Canada faces cascading crises related to affordability, environmental and geopolitical disruptions to global trade and supply chains and threats to our sovereignty. However, the fundamental importance of food security to national security – and food sovereignty to Canadian sovereignty – remains under-recognized and narrowly understood.
This disconnect is reaching a breaking point as food insecurity across Canada reaches historic levels, affecting approximately 10-million Canadians with that number expected to rise. CEOs of Canada’s largest hunger relief organizations argue that the growing inability of one quarter of Canadians to secure adequate food is a threat to Canada’s resilience, safety, and sovereignty.
Increasingly, this link is being made. A recent commentary in Policy Options explained how the omission of food from Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy leaves strategic autonomy over the food system’s critical supply chains unexamined and unprotected. The co-founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators argues that Canada must adopt the mindset that food sovereignty is the ‘next frontier’ of national security investment. Leading agri-food scholars and investment organizations are calling for Canada to seize a sustainable future through increased investment in agri-food resources, technological innovations, and export superpower.
While such investments are imperative, our approach to navigating this ‘next frontier’ must be multi-pronged and multi-scaled ensuring that the benefits of national security investment are most directly felt across Canadian communities, dinner tables, and backyards. To this end, it is critical that community food systems be understood and treated as critical, multi-use infrastructure that is foundational to national sovereignty and resilience.
Canada’s food security disconnect with national defence
In January, the Government of Canada announced plans to develop a national food security strategy to strengthen domestic production and improve access to affordable, nutritious food. This was followed in February by the unveiling of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy, which notably makes no mention of food, despite one of the key pillars being “securing supply chains for key inputs and goods.”
In his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that a country that cannot feed itself has few options. Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty views civilian preparedness, which rests upon food and water systems, as a central pillar of Allies’ collective resilience and defence. Indeed, the vulnerability of food-insecure populations is evident worldwide, with contemporary examples including the Russian / Ukrainian and Israeli / Palestinian conflicts. Increasing aggression and growing conflict in the Middle East add fuel to the fire.
Canada is not immune.
Food supply chain weaknesses and heavy reliance on foreign imports and processing capacity render Canadian communities vulnerable. Scientists estimate that 30 per cent of all food and beverages are imported, including 80 per cent of fruit and 60 per cent of vegetables. Canada depends on foreign ports, global shipping routes, intercontinental trucking networks, and “just-in-time” distribution models to feed its residents, which assumes uninterrupted energy, transportation, and communications. The Center for Security Policy warns that a typical supermarket chain only has enough food in its stores and warehouses to support a local population for 1-3 days.
Prioritization of export-oriented models, low-cost, high-choice consumption, and centralized efficiencies have compromised regional self-sufficiency. In a volatile era, dependency is liability, and Canadians are being further strapped by exceptionally high levels of corporate concentration that enable record-breaking profits for retail giants despite unparalleled growth in food insecurity.
The community food sector as critical, multi-use infrastructure
Multi-use infrastructure refers to systems that strengthen civilian wellbeing and economic opportunity while enhancing national security. Beyond pipelines, energy grids, transportation corridors, communications networks, and emergency services, community food system infrastructure is critical.
While large-scale agricultural productivity is essential, the community food sector remains underestimated and framed narrowly as emergency relief for those dependent upon charity. This sentiment is mirrored in our social policy and budget allocations by the federal government. Of the $670 million recently pledged, as part of new measures to make food more accessible for Canadians, only three per cent will be directed to community food sector infrastructure (predominantly food banks), while 97 per cent of the funds are directed to industrial production and conventional grocery retailers.
This misses the mark. We must diversify and regionalize supply chains and better illuminate and support the full range of infrastructure, expertise and capacity encompassed by the community food sector.
Community food infrastructure and resilience
Across Canada, a vast community food sector has developed in response to food insecurity. This includes food banks, but also food hubs, social/solidarity supermarkets, community pantries, kitchens, gardens, cooperatives, farmers’ markets, urban agriculture projects, and small-scale retailers that form alternative access points outside the mainstream industrial supply chain.
In more recent years, due to policy gaps, immigrant settlement agencies, community health centres, afterschool programs and religious and cultural organizations are increasingly serving as food access points. A 2022 report by Second Harvest examines this “hidden food network,” detailing that community-based food initiatives outnumber traditional grocery stores roughly four to oneand yet operate with no centralized database or coordinated record of impact. Their scale may be modest individually, but collectively they form a resilient web.
This is not peripheral activity. It is critical infrastructure that requires federal attention and support. These sites diversify and shorten supply chains, provide affordable and culturally appropriate food, facilitate storage and redistribution, support local producers and processing, divert food waste, and create value-added pathways for surplus food.
Community organizations frequently provide wraparound services beyond food distribution, including health and social services, entrepreneurial and employment supports. They also address inequities produced by market withdrawal from low-income neighbourhoods.
Further, in the event of border closures, energy disruptions, or transportation breakdowns, localized food networks buffer shocks and maintain some continuity. They were vital to emergency response capacity during the COVID-19 crisis, where municipalities like the City of Toronto leaned on the community food sector as “last-mile” infrastructure to distribute food. Similar mobilizations occurred nationwide, spurring municipal and regional governments to reconsider their role in bolstering community food infrastructure.
From charity to national security
Local recognition and investment are important. However, the lacklustre support for community-based food system infrastructure at the federal level undermines the realities of their prevalence and potential as assets to be strategically leveraged for Canada’s sovereignty.
Currently, community food infrastructure remains underfunded and framed as emergency relief rather than critical infrastructure, obscuring its dual role in meeting immediate needs while strengthening systemic resilience and national security.
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If food security is national security, food systems must be embedded in infrastructure planning, emergency preparedness, and national defence at multiple scales. Canada’s national food security strategy must not only bolster domestic production and export strength but also leverage existing community infrastructure and capacity, and ensure investment dollars flourish at the scale within which Canadians live their daily lives.
This could include formally designating community food hubs, regionalized distribution networks, storage facilities, commercial kitchens, cold storage and refrigerated transport as critical infrastructure, and increasing investment through broadening capital funding and eligibility criteria for programs like the Local Food Infrastructure Fund.
It could also include ramping up public procurement policies to prioritize regional sourcing for Canada’s National School Food Program, hospitals and other government institutions to stabilize local producers, build redundancy and economic multiplier effects. Competition policy reform could address excessive retail concentration and support cooperative, public and community-owned food enterprises. It also means ensuring that food is part of future iterations of the Defence Industrial Strategy.
A sovereign nation must be able to feed itself and prioritize resilient, equitable regional food systems and empowered communities. Local and regional systems of food production, processing, distribution and access require priority investment to fully leverage their capacity as key pathways for bolstering Canadian security.
