Produce industry members to voice their concerns ahead of federal elections

Oct 09, 2024

OTTAWA – The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada (FVGC) and the Canadian Produce Marketing Association (CPMA) will hold their fall joint advocacy event, Fall Harvest 2024, November 18-20, on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa.

Fall Harvest is an annual event that provides produce industry members with unique opportunities to meet with Parliamentarians and other key government officials, to discuss critical issues impacting the Canadian fresh fruit and vegetable sector.

The fresh fruit and vegetable industry is a vibrant part of the Canadian economy that works tirelessly to improve the health of Canadians while contributing $15 billion annually to Canada’s GDP, and supporting over 185 000 jobs in communities across the country. As we look ahead to a potential federal election, now is the time to ensure that the voice of the Canadian produce sector is heard in Ottawa and work with the government to establish practical solutions that will advance the industry’s competitiveness in the global marketplace.

This year’s edition of Fall Harvest will focus on how the federal government can support our industry in ensuring that Canadians continue to have access to safe and nutritious fruits and vegetables. Topics of discussions will include improving access to labour, supporting the industry’s sustainability efforts, and establishing a financial protection mechanism for produce sellers through Bill C-280, the Financial Protection for Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Farmers Act, which has been a longstanding advocacy focus for both FVGC and CPMA.

To participate in Fall Harvest 2024, FVGC and CPMA members are invited to register by October 11.

Source : FVCG

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