Clouds Begin to Clear Over Canadian Pea Market: Alberta Pulse Growers

Jun 11, 2025

The Canadian pea market has been under intense pressure in recent months due to major trade disruptions with its two biggest export destinations: China and India. Together, these countries have accounted for about 75% of Canadian pea exports in 2024/25, making any policy shift a high-stakes affair.

“The first cloud showed up very unexpectedly in March,” says Chuck Penner of LeftField Commodity Research in the Alberta Pulse Growers’ latest Pulse Market Insight newsletter, referring to China’s sudden implementation of 100% import tariffs on peas and other agricultural products. “Up to that point in the 2024/25 marketing year, China was the destination for 30% of both yellow and green peas from Canada.” The immediate effect was a sharp drop in bids across the Prairies.

India represents the second major uncertainty. After shutting out Canadian yellow peas with 50% tariffs in 2017, India finally reduced tariffs to 0% in late 2023. However, “that reprieve always had a deadline attached,” Penner explains. The latest deadline was set for May 31, 2025. Given that India has accounted for 47% of Canadian yellow pea exports so far in 2024/25, the risk of reimposed tariffs has weighed heavily on the market.

But there are signs of improvement. Last week, India announced a longer extension of the zero-tariff window, now set to run until March 31, 2026. “This ‘extended extension’ is good news because it reaches well into the 2025/26 marketing year and allows trading of new-crop peas,” says Penner. Still, he cautions, “it’s not going to trigger a huge flood of Canadian peas moving into India in the short-term,” noting that Indian importers are still sitting on large inventories that are depressing prices.

China’s situation also offers a hint of optimism. Despite tariffs coming into effect in March 2025, “Canada managed to export 170,000 tonnes of peas to China in April,” Penner notes. “We’re not quite sure how or why that happened, but if this means further exports to China are possible in the coming months, it’s certainly a positive sign.”

Looking back just a few weeks ago, the outlook was grim. “The worst-case scenario, with both India and China stopping imports, was bleak with the potential for burdensome supplies and lower prices,” Penner recalls. “Now it seems a few rays of light are shining from behind the clouds.”

Source : Seed AB

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”

Clouds Begin to Clear Over Canadian Pea Market: Alberta Pulse Growers

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

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