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........

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