July 17, 2014 – Winnipeg, Manitoba – Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
The Agri-Innovators Committee was mandated to provide advice to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food on various aspects of innovation for the sector, with a view to accelerating the development and adoption of innovation to make the sector more profitable, competitive, and sustainable.
Committee deliberations on the four themes resulted in the following six overarching and interrelated recommendations:
- Canada needs a competitive business environment to become a destination of choice for investment, especially in R&D and value-added processing.
- A “fast-to-market” mindset among governments, academia and industry is critical to compete in global markets.
- A modern science-based regulatory environment is a key component of a competitive business environment that enables access to appropriate inputs and maximizes global market access opportunities. Alignment across various jurisdictions within Canada is necessary.
- Better coordination, collaboration, and leveraging of resources, as well as a customer-driven focus, are achievable through R&D partnerships and clusters involving government, academia, and industry.
- Benchmarking is an important tool for understanding our current capacities and assessing them against those of our competitors (e.g. adoption of new products, practices, processes, and technologies), as well as for ensuring more productive use of existing and future resources.
- Building awareness of the opportunities in the agriculture and agri-food sector, as well as explaining the role of modern agricultural technologies, and Canada’s robust approval processes for food and novel production techniques will be critical to support an innovative sector.
Agri-Innovators Committee member biographies are available on AAFC’s website at agriculture.canada.ca/AIC.
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