Justine Hendricks was at the Canada in Asia Conference in Singapore in early 2025 when she had an a-ha moment. As the CEO of Farm Credit Canada, the Regina-based federal Crown corporation with 100-plus branches and a century-old mission to finance Canadian agriculture, Hendricks was trying to tempt investors to give Canadian farming a chance.

During one meeting, she asked a major Asia-Pacific agri-food investor if he had any feedback for Canada.

“Your country,” Hendricks recalls him replying, “has everything we could want: natural resources, an educated population, strong political environment and a democracy with an outstanding reputation.

“So, what the hell is Canada waiting for?”

By almost every measure, Canada is an agricultural superpower. Farms cover nearly 154 million acres, and we grow just about everything. We’re the world’s largest producer and exporter of canola and pulses, and a major player in wheat, oats, barley, beef and pork. Potatoes, apples, cranberries, blueberries, mushrooms—you name it, we grow it. We also punch above our weight in beef and pork, exporting far more than we can consume, and we’re world leaders in breeding and genetics, and in food safety standards.

All told, agriculture contributes 7% of the national GDP—just shy of $150 billion a year. Transforming crops and animals into ready-to-eat food employs more than 300,000 people and accounts for 17.2% of total manufacturing, the largest share of any industry coast to coast.

We’ve lost our swagger on the global market, however. Canada’s share of agrifood trade has fallen half a percentage point since 2000, according to a February report from Royal Bank of Canada. We now sit in seventh place, knocked down from fifth by China and Brazil. Unless the sector’s productivity shortcomings are fixed, Canada is likely to fall to ninth over the next decade, said the RBC report.