A few weeks separated Prime Minister Mark Carney’s well-received speech at Davos from the publication of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS). The strategy’s “Build-Partner-Buy” framework identifies 10 sovereign capacities Canada must prioritize. Surprisingly, food didn’t make the cut.
Canada is one of the world’s largest food exporters, and trade agreements exist to guarantee market access, but these assurances fall short if we lose the capacity to cultivate our lands, breed livestock, and feed our citizens. By leaving food out of the DIS, Canada has left strategic autonomy over the food system unexamined and unprotected.
Food system beholden to foreign inputs
Like the military, Canada’s agrifood sector is largely dependent on imports for inputs, equipment, and digital technologies. More than 80 per cent of active antibiotic ingredients originate from China and India, vital for both human and animal health. Pesticides are predominantly manufactured in India, China, the United States, Germany, and Japan. Canada holds a genuine global advantage in nitrogen and potash through the company Nutrien, but relies on China, Russia and Morocco for phosphorus, and input distribution remains vulnerable to infrastructure disruption, a demonstrated weakness.
Canada is also heavily reliant on imported large-scale machinery. A short-line manufacturing sector exists, but unresolved interoperability questions limit how effectively it can fill that gap. The dependency runs deeper than hardware: since 2024, major equipment providers like John Deere and CNH have embedded Starlink terminals directly into their machines, routing Canadian farm operations through a privately controlled U.S. satellite network.
Investment concerns
The layered foreign dependency that alarms defence planners is taking root in the food system, and Canada is doing little to build its way out of it. Public and private investment in agrifood has sharply declined – by 15 per cent since 2010 – and a lack of strategic alignment to foster innovation continues to hinder farm productivity and food processing for value addition.
The $5 billion pledged by a Farm Credit Canada-led coalition earlier last month is a welcome signal, but the test will be whether it reaches the risk takers who can move the sector forward.
Complicating matters further is the murky issue of foreign investments and land ownership. Foreign investment is technically subject to the Investment Canada Act, and sensitive agricultural technologies fall within its scope. The Act’s updated guidelines name food as one of the 10 critical infrastructure sectors. But land purchases, without large-scale farm operations, will likely not fall under its scrutiny.
Provincial differences create vulnerabilities
All the while, provinces impose differing regulations on land acquisition by non-Canadian entities, leaving the door open not just to economic opportunism but to deliberate interference. Food systems are vulnerable to agrocrime – including the biowarfare tactic of agroterrorism – whether for economic or political motivations. Synthetic biology has lowered the barrier to producing biological weapons capable of targeting large-scale production and disrupting supply chains and localized food systems.
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Take for example Canada’s poultry sector, where a credible agroterrorism threat isn’t a sophisticated pathogen but the deliberate introduction of a common viral or bacterial disease into flocks. Many of these diseases are zoonotic, like avian influenza or salmonella, posing a risk to humans.
Coordinated cyberattacks on supply chain infrastructures are also on the rise. As the industry digitalizes, new vulnerabilities open for exploitation, and food is a particularly attractive target because spoilage creates immediate leverage. Dairy farms, meat processing plants, and industry giants like RECIPE Unlimited Corp (which owns Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s) have fallen victim to ransomware attacks. The sector is aware of the risks, but safeguards are cost and human resource intensive. Job cuts at AAFC and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are moving us in the wrong direction.
DIS-placed workers and materials
The DIS will reshape the agricultural economy in ways nobody seems to be talking about. Creating 125,000 new defence sector jobs intensifies competition for skilled workers – already in short supply in the agrifood sector – raising the real possibility that rural industries lose talent to heavily subsidized defence manufacturing hubs. Defence procurement’s push to secure domestic supplies of metals, critical minerals, and industrial chemicals risks tightening markets agriculture depends on too. A strategy designed to fortify national sovereignty may unintentionally strain Canada’s agrifood system unless policymakers explicitly account for these pressures.
Food critical to Canadian sovereignty
Strategic autonomy in agriculture means reducing critical dependencies and securing supply chains, a priority that becomes more complex given Canada’s export-oriented model. But export strength and domestic resilience pull in the same direction. Reinforcing local food networks, diversifying farming systems, and ensuring food is also produced for Canadian consumers are all part of that.
The average age of farm operators in Canada is 56. A resilient agriculture system needs to be designed at a regional level, built to attract the next generation of farmers, not just optimize the current one.
Prime Minister Carney’s government has acknowledged that sovereign capabilities will evolve with the threat landscape. That opening should be used. Food systems belong in any credible defence framework, and action plans need to move beyond stockpiling toward building adaptive capacity. Canada is a world-class agrifood exporter with a hard-earned reputation for food safety. The DIS hasn’t caught up to that yet.
