The Monopoly Problem at the Heart of Canada’s Food System

Introduction

Canadians today are more familiar with the shortcomings of their food system than they would likely prefer. The supply shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid food price inflation in the following years, and now Donald Trump’s manipulation of tariffs as a key instrument of his foreign policy have brought the often-hidden nature of the food system to the kitchen tables of Canadians. Underlying these recent cost-of-living pressures, brought to the forefront by these economic shocks, is a system that has experienced dramatic consolidation that has left important markets in the hands of a small number of players. Producers have been squeezed at both ends of their livelihoods, food system workers are facing low wages and harsh conditions, and consumers are on the hook for steadily rising prices. By understanding the causes and cost of consolidation and corporate power in the food system, Canadians can begin to chart a new course for the markets that provide products essential to our survival: what we put on our table to keep ourselves, our families, and our communities healthy.

Our Current State: Consolidated

While the ongoing cost-of-living crisis facing Canadians has been provoked by recent global events, the consolidation of the Canadian food system has been a long-running and strenuous process. In the world of “antitrust,” the American term for the body of law intended to police monopoly power, consolidation and the resulting market concentration is more like the smoke, but not the actual fire, of competition concerns. Fewer players in a market means less options for consumers, whether individuals or businesses, and a higher likelihood for the kind of price collusion—fixing the price of goods, dividing up territory between players—that is easier to maintain among fewer players. Antitrust authorities have developed rules of thumb to determine when high concentration begins to warrant concern. One such metric is the concentration ratio (CR), which measures the percentage of market share held by the largest firms in a market. Typically, a CR4 (the market share represented by the top four firms) above 40% signals moderately high levels of concentration that can lead to market distortions and an increased risk of collusion. A CR4 above 60% is considered highly concentrated and at an elevated risk of competition concerns. 

Looking at national concentration levels–crude measures that paper over more intense regional and local concentration–many aspects of the Canadian food system exhibit alarming degrees of market concentration. While Canadians are likely to be familiar with the story in retail grocery with five major firms holding over 75% of the national share, concentration is more extreme at the segments of the food system unseen by most Canadians. ¹ Food wholesale and distribution networks, for example, have deep ties with the concentrated retail sector, further weakening competition in the sector.

Concentration is also rampant in other parts of Canadian food supply chains. A single company, Nutrien, controls 60% of not just Canada’s but North America’s potash production, a key input to the manufacture of fertilizer. ² The market for canola seeds is an effective duopoly, with BASF making up 60% and Bayer-Monsanto the remaining 40%.³ The situation is just as intense in the market for large farming equipment, with John Deere holding over 50% followed by CNH Industrial at 35% and AGO at a distant 7%.⁴ Two companies make up nearly 100% of beef slaughterhouses in the country. ⁵ Processing of hogs is more diverse but no cause for celebration, with a CR4 last measured in 2019 of roughly 70%. ⁶ 

Meanwhile the least concentrated link in the food system, the producer level, is headed in the same direction. The overall number of farms in Canada has been steadily falling for the past quarter century, while the average farm size in Canada rose from 676 acres in 2001 to 809 acres in 2021. At the same time, the number of farms over 3500 acres has nearly doubled in that same period. ⁷ In terms of crops, aside from modest growth in canola and soybeans, other major crop categories have seen the number of independent farms drop steadily over the past 40 years. The same goes for major livestock categories of cows, pigs, and chickens. At the final step before products hit the shelves the story is no better. Across multiple consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories in Canada, four to eight companies frequently compose nearly 90% of sales. ⁸

The purpose of this parade of statistics is to illustrate the near universality of the march to concentration that has taken place in our food system. Canadian competition law, our antitrust equivalent, has until recently embraced a unique commitment to the tradeoff between competition and the alleged benefits of consolidation under the headline of efficiencies. Though the definition of efficiency is indefinite, efficiencies arising from a merger or acquisition generally contemplate doing more with less, either by making goods with fewer inputs or investing in innovation that transforms products and processes. Many jurisdictions consider the efficiencies proposed by the merging parties in determining whether a merger is pro- or anti-competitive, but until recently Canada was alone in its acceptance of otherwise anti-competitive mergers where harms could supposedly be offset by claimed efficiencies. Canada would accept reduced competition so long as the theoretical ledger could be balanced with claimed cost-savings, most frequently in the form of post-merger layoffs. In sectors where economies of scope and scale can be a very real factor, the efficiency of defense supercharged consolidation even when resulting harms to competition were clearly articulated.

Despite its outsized commitment to efficiencies, Canada is just one front of the consolidation of the global food system. Peer countries like the United States, Australia, and members of the European Union, equally enticed by the promise of more efficient production, have seen concentration levels steadily rise. The same pattern applies across much of the developing world.

Concentration is especially pronounced among  agricultural input suppliers and commodity trading firms. Turning away from national statistics towards the global picture, multiple markets exhibit staggering levels of concentration. The top four global grain traders control more than 70% of the global market, the same goes for the top six agrochemical and animal pharmaceutical companies. Seeds and farming machinery are not much better with six firms making up over 50% of their global markets. ⁹ Like their national counterparts, these global statistics mask that individuals and businesses dependent on these markets have even less choice in their own local markets. While there may be four major global seed firms, canola growers in Canada have just two choices on the ground—Bayer-Monsanto or BASF—to access needed seed varieties. ¹⁰ Born out of a toxic combination of real gains from economies of scale, an ignorance of the need for competition to distribute those gains broadly, and the financial rewards for acquisitive behaviour, Canada and its global peers are now reckoning with the consequences of this global march to monopoly in food systems. 

Why care about consolidation?

The highly concentrated nature of the Canadian agrifood landscape raises multiple concerns. Economists and competition authorities focus primarily on the potential for dominant firms in concentrated markets to push up consumer prices, and in select cases to push down prices paid to farmers and workers. But concerns arising from corporate concentration in the food system go far beyond just prices and include broader conditions within food systems. 

It boils down to power. When just a few firms control nodes of food supply chains, they have the power to shape what our food system looks like, how much choice and voice we have within it, as well as our access to a healthy and sustainable diet. ¹¹

Market Advantages to Agrifood Firms

The oligopolistic nature of the food system means that top firms have the power to affect the contours of  the market to their benefit, often colluding to artificially direct the flow of competition and raise prices. In 2017, competition authorities were made aware of four of the five major grocery firms working together to fix bread prices over a 16-year period, only after a lead firm broke ranks with the cartel. ¹² In that period, the price of bread rose twice as much as the overall increase in the price of food sold in Canada, costing Canadian consumers of this basic staple possibly billions more than they otherwise would have paid in a competitive market. ¹³

While the Bureau has not pursued the broader case, documents surfaced through the proceeding suggest that other staple food categories may have been subject to coordinated behaviour as well. Though less outright than the bread case, concern about possible coordinated action was directed at grocery companies during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing period of high food inflation. From 2019 to 2022, the profits of the three largest grocery firms collectively grew from $2.4 billion to $3.6 billion, mainly due to what the Competition Bureau called “modest yet meaningful’ increases in gross margins over that period. ¹⁴ This finding suggests that those firms were able to take advantage of market turmoil to raise prices without the competitive forces that would have competed away these excess profits. 

Again, this is not a Canada-specific phenomenon. Several Canadian firms are among the top four in the North American frozen potato products market and have recently been served antitrust lawsuits for colluding to fix prices in the United States, which complainants say led to a 47% price increase since 2021. ¹⁵ But it is not just collusion that is the concern. Analysts at the University of Saskatchewan, for example, have warned that the recently approved the merger between Bunge and Viterra, which together control 45% of bulk grain export capacity in Canada, could result in increased handling prices and the loss of over $700 million per year to producers as well as reduced incentives to invest in needed infrastructure. ¹⁶ In approving the deal, Transport Canada required Bunge to sell some of Viterra’s grain elevators and imposed conditions on potential conflicts of interest arising from the transaction, but the remedies are unlikely to protect producers harmed by the merger. ¹⁷

As power in the market increases, so too does the ability of large agrifood firms to boost their bottom lines. In 2017, the large agricultural input firms met at an annual meeting of CropLife America—an industry association—to develop a strategy to push back against new online vendors of farm inputs, including Farmers Business Network (FBN), which sought to provide more price transparency for farmers by putting prices of inputs online. When FBN then purchased the Saskatchewan-based physical input retailer Yorkton Distributors to expand into the Canadian market, the major input firms promptly cancelled their contracts with Yorkton, blocking this new source of competition. The Canadian Competition Bureau investigated, and although it found that the firms communicated with each other on a collective strategy regarding FBN, it did not pursue the case given the lack of a formal agreement among the dominant input firms. ¹⁸ 

This exercise of market power on the part of the big firms in the sector has real consequences for consumers as well as producers. It pushes up food prices and raises costs for farmers. Across markets like farming equipment dealers, fertilizer manufacturers, grain companies, and seed and chemical companies, over 60% of surveyed farmers consider consolidation to have a negative impact on their business. ¹⁹

Shaping Everyday Features of Food Systems

Dominant agrifood firms also have enormous power to shape the material conditions of food systems that affect farmers, workers, and consumers in concrete ways on a daily basis. The influence of input firms over innovation is a case in point. Competition authorities typically consider whether a proposed merger might harm competition so much that it dampens innovation. But they do not assess how some innovations can further harm competition. In the 1980s and 1990s, dominant seed and agrochemical firms consolidated as they ramped up investment in their patented genetically modified seeds which they engineered to be resistant to their own brand of herbicides. Farmers were forced to sign technology agreements that prevented them from saving their own seeds to replant the next season and from using alternative brands of herbicides. ²⁰ In 1998, Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser was sued by Monsanto for having that firm’s patented GM seed in his field without having purchased it and signing the agreement. Schmeiser rose to fame by resisting the firm, insisting that the seed blew onto his field from neighbouring farms. But Schmeiser still lost the case in Canadian courts, which ruled that he infringed on Monsanto’s patent. ²¹ By the mid -2000s, it was almost impossible to find conventional, non-GM seeds on the market. 

Labour conditions are also shaped by the dominant players. When just a few employers exist in a sector, they have enormous capacity to influence not just wages but working conditions as well. In some extremely concentrated sectors, such as meatpacking, poor working conditions and low wages are commonplace. Canada’s duopoly beef processing sector, dominated by just two firms, Cargill and JBS, rely extensively on predatory immigrant and temporary migrant labour. ²² During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that the working conditions at these plants were highly problematic, with investigations revealing that these firms endangered precarious workers—who had little other opportunity for employment—by demanding that they work long hours without sufficient protection from transmission of the virus. ²³

Dominant firms in the grocery retail sector also shape food food environments,  influencing people’s ability to access nutritious foods. For example, it is a fairly common practice that large and dominant retail firms put restrictive conditions on leases of properties when they close a grocery retail outlet that stipulate that another grocery store cannot open in that same location. These restrictions impede economic freedom and kill competition, and the result is people with fewer options to access food, as food deserts where few healthy options exist spread in geographic scope. Though the use of such conditions is a longstanding practice in the food retail sector, the Canadian Competition Bureau only began investigating companies like Loblaws and Sobeys in 2024 for the use of these restrictive clauses. ²⁴

Danger Ahead: How Concentration Can Influence Policy

The giants of the food system have inordinate power to shape policy and governance processes as well. We know from lobby disclosure records that in 2022, Bayer CropScience communicated with Canadian government policymakers 10 times, Corteva Agriscience 18 times, the pesticide industry lobby group CropLife 34 times. That same year, the fertilizer giant Nutrien contacted government officials over 80 times as a new framework on fertilizer use and climate change was being developed. ²⁵

Agribusiness firms were also highly active in seeking to influence the Canadian government’s regulatory framework for gene editing from 2019 to 2023, with several lobby groups such as CropLife Canada (which boasts Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta as members) working closely with Canadian regulators behind closed doors. According to reporting on this interaction from Radio Canada based on freedom of information requests, the initial regulation document was created by a director of CropLife Canada. ²⁶ When the federal government finally did open the process for public consultation, it chose the summer months when most farmers were busy in their fields. 

It is not just direct influence through large firm-lobbying in the sector that affects policy and governance. They also work in less direct ways to shape discourse and even scientific understanding. When concern was growing about the safety of the herbicide glyphosate and several governments, including Canada’s, were considering the scientific evidence in deciding whether to renew the chemical for use, Monsanto directly engaged in influencing the science. The firm sponsored scientific studies on glyphosate’s safety while contracting outside scientists to put their names on those papers. The firm hired a Canadian consulting firm to identify scientists to participate in the scheme, resulting in 5 academic papers that gave glyphosate a favourable assessment. Monsanto took an active role in reviewing and editing the papers, and the authors did not declare their relationship to the firm. ²⁷ Those papers eventually were considered in Canada’s reapproval of glyphosate, despite growing concern about its safety, including a statement from the International Agency for Research on Cancer—a World Health Organization agency—that the chemical is “probably carcinogenic.” ²⁸

The Influence of Foreign Multinationals

Beyond their power to shape aspects of the food system, another major problem in the Canadian context is that the majority of the top businesses across our food system are multinational firms, with many headquartered in the United States. This predominance of foreign-based agrifood firms is apparent in the beef packing industry, where Cargill (based in the U.S.) and JBS (a Brazilian firm) comprise nearly the entire market. ²⁹ In the grain trade, several of the dominant grain handling firms are foreign—Cargill (U.S.) with around 15% of the market, and Bunge (U.S.), which just bought Viterra,  with around 37% of the market. ³⁰ The two firms that dominate the canola seed market—BASF and Bayer—are both German firms. In the processed and packaged goods sector, US multinationals are dominant forces in our food system. Though seemingly innocuous for Canada’s reputation as a trading nation open to the world and foreign capital, the recent moves by the Trump administration to push the boundaries of the U.S. relationship with allies brings the wisdom of these dependencies into question. 

Although we do have some Canadian firms in the sector, the combination of high levels of market concentration and a high proportion of foreign firms that dominate in those markets creates risks for our food system. Given the U.S. tariffs imposed on Canada, the high degree of integration of U.S. firms in highly concentrated markets risks undermining Canada’s sovereignty over its food system. Foreign-based firms tend to keep the highest value-added activities in their supply chains, as well as corporate decision-making, in their home country, meaning fewer benefits for Canada in terms of jobs, investment and economic autonomy. Foreign firms can also pull out of Canada at any time, as we saw with Heinz divesting from its Leamington, Ontario tomato ketchup facility in 2014, resulting in the loss of over 700 jobs. ³¹ While the firm eventually reinvested in Canada, the departure was a reminder of the tenuous commitment of foreign firms to Canadian markets. 

Where do we need to go from here?

The highly concentrated nature of Canada’s food system has heightened risks for Canada, affecting producers, food system workers, and consumers in ways that affect incomes, food access, working conditions, food choices, and political voice. It is vital that we take back our food system so that it can better serve the needs of Canadians—providing us with food and livelihoods that nourish and sustain us, rather than serving the needs of far-flung corporate giants. To recenter our food system and reclaim it from corporate behemoths, we need action on multiple fronts. 

A first step would be to make the most of the recently reformed Competition Act in support of a better food system. Accepting the current level of concentration as a given, additional scrutiny against abuses of corporate dominance and collusive behaviour is warranted. Canada’s sole competition law enforcer, the Competition Bureau, should have resources dedicated to the monitoring and enforcing of fair competition in the food system. But an agency of 400-odd staff with a remit of the entire Canadian economy will always have its attention split. Responsibility for fair competition should be shared by other federal regulators with oversight of the food system and provincial counterparts, including the future potential for provincial competition authorities. Along with private access to the Competition Act, the ability of companies and public interest groups to bring competition cases, a more distributed and assertive public enforcement of Canada’s competition law is the only way to keep enough eyes on the street to police dominant corporations.

But managed competition between oligopolies will always be a second-best scenario relative to creating and maintaining a truly fair and competitive food system. To reverse the tide of consolidation, structural remedies, or break-ups, are necessary to revive competition in monopolized and stagnant markets. It will always be easier to come together than to break apart, and the longer the process of coming together the more complex the process of unwinding. But break ups are not the extreme remedies they are often framed by opponents. Competition authorities routinely pursue structural remedies to competition issues, most often in the case of proposed mergers and acquisitions. But to be worth the effort, break ups must be focused on the bottlenecks of economic power and not only reduce the power of individual monopolists but create the foundation for durable competition. 

A prime target for this kind of action are the markets that reflect the characteristics of networks that can either enable competition or choke it off depending on the incentives of those in control. As Canadian food wholesale and distribution networks have increasingly been rolled up by players like Loblaws and Sobeys, those networks increasingly serve to deepen moats rather than support new competitors entering the space. Integration of this kind, rather than splitting the geographic footprint of individual players, should be top of mind for policy makers considering structural solutions to the issue of monopoly in the food system.

The diversification of markets is not just about breaking up existing firms but also of breathing new life into concentrated markets by enabling newcomers to compete on a fair footing. While competition policy is often framed in the negative, preventing consolidation and anti-competitive conduct, just as important is the entry and expansion of alternatives to provide a check on corporate power. Canada should take a broad definition of these potential alternatives and invest in supporting their emergence and growth. This includes not only creating openings for private sector players to compete with dominant firms, but also co-operative and public alternatives with incentives geared towards supporting more diverse markets rather than profit motives. 

The Ontario Food Terminal, the largest fresh fruit and produce whole and distribution center in Canada, serves as an excellent model of one such alternative. Funded entirely through fees charged to users, the terminal is an operational enterprise within the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. The food terminal addresses a market need, wholesale and distribution for the food system, without the conflicts of interest that come from vertically integrated wholesale, distribution, and retail operations. Territorial markets – local and regional farmers markets and other kinds of market arrangements, are another kind of model that deserves more government support, including funding for infrastructure and policies that encourage and make accessible food marketing options outside of the dominant corporate supply chains. ³² Understanding what markets in Canada would benefit from these alternatives, what barriers keep them from being established today, and what support is necessary to make them a reality are key components of breaking the dependence on dominant players in the food system.

Strong measures are also needed to curb the political power of firms in agrifood policy making in Canada. Reining in the influence of dominant firms requires measures such as stricter rules on lobbying expenditures and activities, as well as tighter rules on conflicts of interest and corporate funding for science. Too often food and agricultural policy processes are captured by large and powerful firms in Canada. Steps must be taken to open up those spaces to allow other voices such as farmers, civil society organizations, Indigenous peoples, food system workers, and citizens, to have a say. ³³ More support for local and regional food policy councils, for example, as well as openings for such groups to more actively participate in setting agrifood policies, would be a welcome development. Although Canada adopted A Food Policy for Canada in 2019, much of Canada’s agrifood policy still focuses on corporate needs for growth rather than broader goals for other actors in the food system. ³⁴

A food system that is fair, resilient, and delivers for Canadians will require a break from the path of least resistance. But post-pandemic inflation, a rediscovery of the value of competition policy, and the new era of our relationship with our neighbour to the south may prove to be the motivation necessary to pursue a different path. In the areas of the food system Canadians interact with directly there is a growing understanding of the costs of an approach that favoured consolidation over competition for decades. This energy can be directed to the entire food system, where the same pattern has occurred out of sight from Canadians. Rather than a consolidated food system dominated by domestic and foreign giants, a better food system would prioritize independence, resilience, and a fair deal for consumers, producers, and food systems workers through the kinds of policies outlined above. A revitalization of Canadian competition law, focused investment in alternatives to a monopolized food system and a bulwark against corporate influence on the future evolution of the food system are not enough in isolation to achieve that vision, but if pursued together they are first steps to make that vision more proximate.

Notes

1. Competition Bureau. (2023). Canada Needs More Grocery Competition: Competition Bureau Retail Grocery Market Study Report; USDA Foreign Agriculture Service. (July 18, 2023). Canada: Retail Foods. ↩︎
2. Kreisle, N. (2020). Price effects from the merger of agricultural fertilizer manufacturers Agrium and PotashCorp. FTC Bureau of Economics. ↩︎
3. Competition Bureau. (2018). Competition Bureau statement regarding Bayer AG’s acquisition of Monsanto Company. ↩︎
4. Johnson. J. N. (2023, November 22). Plowing ahead: John Deere’s crop of success in turbulent markets. The Globe and Mail.; Garvey, S. (2023, August 31). Profits up at agriculture equipment makers. The Western Producer. Reibel, J. (2018, August 29). Manufacturer consolidation reshaping the farm equipment marketplace. Farm Equipment. ↩︎
5. Helmore, K. (2024, June 10). Cattlemen’s worries grow as Guelph slaughterhouse strike backs up supply chain. Carlberg, J. (2020). Vulnerabilities and benefits of megascale agrifood processing facilities in Canada. ↩︎
6. National Farmers Union. (2023). The Competition Act as a tool for democracy: Fairness for farmers. ↩︎
7. National Farmers Union. (2024). Canadian Agriculture by the Numbers. ↩︎
8. FPT Working Group on Retail Fees. (2021). Retail fees in the Canadian food industry. ↩︎
9. ETC Group. (2022). Food Barons. ↩︎
10. Competition Bureau. (2018). Competition Bureau statement regarding Bayer AG’s acquisition of Monsanto Company; Clapp, J. (2021). The problem with growing corporate concentration and power in the global food system. Nature Food, 2, 404–408. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s43016-021-00297-7 ↩︎
11. Clapp, J. (2022). The rise of big food and agriculture: corporate influence in the food system. In A research agenda for food systems (pp. 45-66). Edward Elgar Publishing. ↩︎
12. Canadian Competition Bureau. 2023. “Canada Bread sentenced to $50 million fine after pleading guilty to fixing wholesale bread prices” [News release]. ↩︎
13. Sagan, Aleksandra. 2018. Bakers, grocers involved in 16-year price-fixing conspiracy: Competition Bureau. CTV News ↩︎
14. Canadian Competition Bureau. 2023. “Canada needs more grocery competition: Competition Bureau retail grocery market study report” [Agency report]. ↩︎
15. Schwenk, Katya. 2025. “The Rise of the French Fry Cartel”, Jacobin. ↩︎
16. Gray, Richard, James Nolan and Peter Slade. 2024. The Economic Impact of the Proposed Bunge-Viterra (BV) Merger on the Grain Sector in Western Canada: A Preliminary Assessment. Working paper. March 27. ↩︎
17. Transport  Canada. 2025. “Government of Canada Announces Approval of Bunge Global SA’s Acquisition of Viterra Limited.” January 14. Available online; Canada Competition Bureau. 2024. “Competition Bureau’s Remedy Assessment Letter to the Minister of Transport for Bunge’s Proposed Acquisition of Viterra”. Nov. 27. Available online; Agricultural Producers Association of Canda. 2025. “Government Oversight Fails Farmers on the Bunge-Viterra Merger”, January 29. Available online. ↩︎
18. AgNews. 2021. US: Lawsuit Alleges Crop Input Suppliers Collude in Pricing. January 21. Available online; Canadian Competition Bureau. 2022. News Release. Available online. ↩︎
19. Haney, S. (2023, August 4). Equipment dealership consolidation a huge concern for farmers, RealAgristudies survey suggests. Real Agriculture. ↩︎
20. Clapp, Jennifer. 2021. “Explaining growing glyphosate use: The political economy of herbicide-dependent agriculture.” Global Environmental Change 67: 102239 ↩︎
21. Peekhaus, Wilhelm. 2011. “Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure of the Commons: Genetically Engineered Seeds and Canadian Jurisprudence.” Science & Society 75(4):529–54. doi: 10.1521/siso.2011.75.4.529. ↩︎
22. Bragg, Bronwyn and M. Jennifer Hyndman. 2024. The real issue at the heart of Canada’s meat processing industry isn’t labour shortages — it’s low wages. The Conversation. August 30. Available online. ↩︎
23. Appel, Jeremy. 2021. Canada’s Largest Meatpacking Facility Is on Trial for Endangering Its Workers During the Pandemic. Jacobin. ↩︎
24. Saba, Rosa. 2024. Why restrictive lease clauses could be hampering grocery competition in Canada. The Canadian Press. ↩︎
25. Clapp, Jennifer. 2025. Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why it Matters (MIT Press). ↩︎
26. Gerbet, Thomas. “Tiger Team”: When Civil Servants and Lobbyists Cooperate in the Shadows. Radio Canada. September 26. Available online; Sharratt, Lucy. 2023. Corporate-Government “Tiger Team” Gutted GMO Regulations. Watershed Sentinel. November 28. Available online. ↩︎
27. Shochat, Gil, and Sylvie Fournier. 2019. Court Documents Reveal Monsanto’s Efforts to Fight Glyphosate’s “Severe Stigma.” CBC News, March 12. Available online. ↩︎
28. Benbrook, Charles M. 2019. How Did the US EPA and IARC Reach Diametrically Opposed Conclusions on the Genotoxicity of Glyphosate-Based Herbicides? Environmental Sciences Europe 31: 2. ↩︎
29. Edmiston, Jake. 2020. “Three meat-packing plants turn out 85% of Canada’s beef. How did this happen?” May 6. Financial Post. ↩︎
30. National Farmers Union. 2023. “Bunge-Viterra merger has drastic implications for Canadian farmers.” June 27. Available online. ↩︎
31. Ligaya, Armina. 2013. “Heinz to close Ontario plant, leaving 740 out of work.” Financial Post. November 14. Available online. ↩︎
32. IPES-Food. 2024. Food From Somewhere: Building Food Security and Resilience through Territorial Markets. ↩︎
33. See, for example, Gaucher-Holm, Alexa, Christine Mulligan, Mary R. L’Abbé, Monique Potvin Kent, and Lana Vanderlee. 2022. “Lobbying and Nutrition Policy in Canada: A Quantitative Descriptive Study on Stakeholder Interactions with Government Officials in the Context of Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy.” Globalization and Health 18(1): 54; National Farmers Union. 2019. Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture Agrifood Study on Public Perception of the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Sector. April 12. Available online. ↩︎
34. Robert, Naomi, Tammara Soma, and Kent Mullilnix. 2024. Neoliberal Growth vs. Food System Democratization: Narrative Analysis of Canadian Federal and Civil Society Agrifood Policy. Agriculture and Human Values. ↩︎