The Canadian food and agriculture sector is for the most part competitive and export-oriented: although challenges and opportunities vary significantly between regions, primary agriculture benefits from an abundance of natural resources and faces limited environmental constraints.

Markets that function well within a stable regulatory and policy environment are key to improving the productivity and sustainability of the food and agriculture sector. This report contains the main findings and policy lessons gained from a series of wide-ranging country reviews on how government policies can improve sectoral productivity and sustainability through their impact on innovation, structural change, natural resource use, and climate change. Improving the policy environment would require rolling back those policies that distort markets the most and retain farmers in uncompetitive and low-income activities, harm the environment, stifle innovation, slow structural and generational change, and weaken resilience.

Australia’s agriculture and food industries are well placed to contribute to the economy’s future growth given the robust prospects of global food demand and the continuing high international competitiveness of these sectors.

Agriculture and the agro-processing sector in Brazil have shown impressive growth over the past two decades. This has largely been driven by productivity improvements and structural adjustment resulting from broad economic reforms, as well as new technologies developed by agricultural science.

The US food and agriculture sector is innovative, competitive and export-oriented. Maintaining high productivity growth in light of changes in national and global demand, while improving the sustainable use of resources, will nonetheless require further innovation.

In Japan, agriculture has been treated differently from other parts of the national economy.

Agricultural innovation in Sweden has sought to improve the competitiveness and sustainability of the agri-food sector by ensuring a high level of environmental and animal welfare standards, while raising the productivity and financial viability of farms.