Overview
The Ivey Agri-food System Transformation Pathways Initiative is engaging key Canadian agri-food system stakeholders through community-based approaches to characterize a shared vision of a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient future food system and then clarify and build momentum around the key pathways that can accelerate transformation towards this desired future.
Agri-food System: Critical Challenges
The Canadian agri-food system is one of the economically most productive in the world. In 2023, the system generated $150.0 billion (7% of Canada's GDP), employing 2.3 million people and providing 1 in 9 jobs in Canada. As one of the world’s largest food producers, Canada exports nearly $99.1 billion in agriculture and food products.
However, while the agri-food system is optimised for economic efficiency, this ‘success’ comes at enormous social and ecological cost. The food system is responsible for more than 20 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with little progress currently predicted in reducing agricultural emissions by 2030 (1% reduction compared to 2005). Agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss for key natural systems and a significant source of pollution. The value of food lost or wasted every year has been estimated to be $50 billion, accounting for 58 percent of total food produced. 8.7 million Canadians, including 2.1 million children, live in food-insecure households. The system is also increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of major shocks including the disruptions of a rapidly changing climate. As a major player in the global food system, Canada is also connected to sustainability challenges at the global scale, including the approximately 900 million people across the world face severe food insecurity.
Need for Transformational Change
These system failures highlight the need for a transition to a new agri-food system – in Canada and globally. To meet the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, the global agri-food system will need to deliver universal access to affordable, nutritious food for 10 billion people, support the livelihoods of producers and communities, while becoming a net sink of GHG emissions and protecting and enhancing ecosystems and biodiversity globally. This will require major changes: for example, widespread adoption of sustainable production practices, intensification of production to eliminate deforestation, shifts towards healthier and more sustainable diets, widespread adoption of circularity practices to eliminate waste, deployment of new technologies, as well as comprehensive measures to drive food access and security.
Current incremental approaches will be insufficient to drive the scale and pace of change required. There is a critical need to explore more transformational approaches to accelerate change towards a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient agri-food system.
System Transformation Pathways Initiative
The Ivey Centre for Building Sustainable Value (BSV Centre) is helping to tackle this challenge, working with communities of changemakers to shape pathways to accelerate transformational change in the agri-food system. Our vision is a Canadian economy where production and consumption systems regenerate nature and society by leveraging their symbiotic relationships. The BSV Centre’s faculty have substantial research expertise across the entire agri-food system, tackling sustainability challenges through a range of multi-disciplinary approaches. The BSV Centre has also established capabilities in system thinking and community development to help empower changemakers to drive change in systems.
The Agri-food System Transformation Pathways Initiative is deploying these capabilities to build momentum around the key pathways that can accelerate system transformation towards a desired future for the agri-food system. In the initial phase of work, this involves:
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Vision of the System. Engaging with a diverse group of leading changemakers and thought leaders across Canada to characterise a collective vision of a desired future for the system.
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Transformation Pathways. Mobilizing a community of ‘change ready’ businesses to reimagine the structures, incentives, financing and procurement relationships to drive change to towards this desired future system. The initial focus of this collaboration will be on accelerating the transition to regenerative outcomes through the value chain.
The initiative is also providing a high-value learning opportunity for Ivey students, supporting independent student research projects to characterise the emerging pathways and solutions to drive change in the food system.
A Multi-Stakeholder Vision of a Desired Agri-food System
The initiative is already engaging a diverse group of changemakers and thought leaders across Canada who are seeking to create a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient food system. Through interviews and focus groups, we are mobilizing a wide range of perspectives to consolidate a “shared” vision of the desired future of the Canadian food system, elaborating the vision defined in the Federal Government’s Food Policy for Canada.
This engagement includes established institutions within the current system, but also entrepreneurs and changemakers in civil society and academia, who are seeking to disrupt the status quo to drive shifts towards regenerative farming, Indigenous food sovereignty, community food security, and circular food systems. The analysis is also drawing on new global thinking on future of the food system, such as the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health, and the report of the Food System Economics Commission.
Our goal is to consolidate this collective wisdom into a synthesis of key goals and attributes of the desired future food system, highlighting identified synergies between goals and attributes, but also surfacing key tensions and differing perspectives.
Driving Transformation Pathways: Regenerative Value Chains
In a further phase of work, we are focusing on the opportunity to leverage private sector expertise, innovation, and entrepreneurship to help shape transition pathways towards a desired future. Through a series of workshops in 2025, we are mobilizing a community of 8-10 leading businesses – including processors, retailers, and financial actors – that are focused on scaling the adoption of regenerative practices through agri-food value chains in Canada.
Tackling a complex system transformation challenge requires a systems approach. Together this community will engage with the challenge of shifting the value chain system, shaping structures and frameworks that incentivize and reward the transition to deliver regenerative outcomes. These workshops will use innovative system thinking tools to characterise barriers in the current system, identify the key leverage points for accelerating change, and then develop a portfolio of priority solutions to accelerate the adoption of regeneration in Canada.
Why is the Initiative focusing on the role of the private sector? Many argue that it is the power and influence of large businesses is a key driver of the current system problems. However, the private sector can also be a key driver of transformational change:
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Business changemakers. Not all businesses are invested in maintaining the status quo. There are a growing number of businesses that understand the critical importance of the transition to a more sustainable and inclusive food system, and how this new system creates compelling opportunities to deliver simultaneous financial and societal value, while enhancing resilience.
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Fundamental role of markets and private transactions. The food system is fundamentally structured around market transactions between private actors (e.g. farmers, entrepreneurs, corporations, households). Understanding and ultimately shifting the structures, incentives, financing and procurement relationships that govern these transactions represent critical levers for transitioning to a desired future system.
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Expertise of Ivey. The business ‘architecture’ of the food system is where Ivey’s researchers have unique expertise and insights and where we can support and complement the work of other changemakers elsewhere in the system.
The company engagement will focus on impactful outcomes. We will work with these motivated firms to help shape the ‘roadmaps’ and concrete actions that they can take both individually (and collectively) to accelerate real progress, as well as elaborating a clear agenda for informing policy making and wider corporate action. This initiative also connects with and complements another major BSV Centre Initiative – Collective Action Program for Sustainable Agriculture – which is working directly with farmers to support communities of practice that accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices.
Interested in learning more or getting involved? Contact Carly MacArthur at cmacarthur@ivey.ca.