Canadian Foodgrains Bank once again recognized as a Top 10 Impact Charity in 2023

Nov 10, 2023

The Canadian Foodgrains Bank has been named one of the Top 10 Impact Charity by Charity Intelligence.

This marks the sixth year in a row that the Canadian Foodgrains Bank has been recognized in the Top 10.

The CFB is an organization that consists of 15 members made up of Christian agencies across the country.

Executive Director Andy Harrington says the Canadian Foodgrains Bank works together for a common goal to end hunger.

"We work in a number of ways and in a number of countries, so we work in humanitarian response. In places like the current Gaza situation, for example, we will probably be having a response there soon. In some of the places that you may have heard of that are undergoing great problems with drought and climate change in East Africa and right across the world. Wherever there are emergencies, where there are food security issues, that's where we work."

He says it's quite humbling to be honored again.

The work of the Foodgrains Bank includes provision of humanitarian assistance (delivering emergency food assistance for people in times of crises and disasters), as well as long-term support for families, including agricultural training and critical nutrition support.

Last year, the Foodgrains Bank worked in 36 countries on over 126 projects, with over 1.1 million people and over $80 million worth of programming.

This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.

Source : Pembinavalley online

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