Global leaders recognize importance of agricultural innovation

Oct 23, 2024

Agricultural innovations can address many of the world's most pressing problems. Growers in Canada and around the world are facing increasing challenges including pest pressures, climate change and global uncertainty. They need access to tools, including plant breeding innovations and pesticides, to grow more high-quality food to meet rising global demands while limiting agricultural impact on the environment. And they need fair, rules-based trade to access the global marketplace. Global leaders are turning their attention to the urgent issue of productivity and recognizing agriculture as a solutions provider.

At a recent B20 meeting in Brazil, the Sustainable Food Systems & Agriculture Task Force set out a series of recommendations to support climate resilience and farmer productivity. This task force brought together business leaders from the G20 countries representing the agricultural value chain and its recommendations were brought forward to the G20 Agricultural Working Group, which will inform G20 meetings in November 2024.

The recommendations of the task force focused on innovation and trade as solutions to food security and economic prosperity. They highlighted the need to enhance productivity growth by fostering scalable and science-based innovation and promoting a more equitable sustainable productivity growth cycle.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids