National food security? Not without a healthy diet

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Canada’s new National Food Security Strategy fails to pay much attention to either the field or the fork end of the system.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 July 2026

698 words

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization describes an agri-food system as encompassing everything from ‘field to fork’. Unfortunately, Canada’s new National Food Security Strategy (NFSS) fails to pay much attention to either the field or the fork end of the system.

At the field end, noted Professor Asim Biswas, Canada Research Chair in Digital Agriculture at the University of Guelph, in an article in the Globe and Mail on July 6th, the NFSS “has little to say about the ground in which that food is grown,” adding that “a food-security strategy that omits the soil has overlooked the one thing on which all the rest depends.”

Moreover, as I pointed out in my July 12th column, there is an almost complete absence of any reference to the environment in the NFSS. So we have a food strategy that doesn’t mention the most fundamental underpinning of our food security, our environment, including the soil.

Nor does the strategy do any better at the fork end of the system. You would think that a national food strategy would have something to say about the nutritious quality of the food that is consumed and the meeting of dietary needs to enable a long and healthy life.

After all, a 2023 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that in Canada “poor dietary pattern is the leading risk factor for loss of life years at the national level”, contributing to between 27 and 39 percent of all deaths in men and between 9 to 23 percent of all deaths in women.

Yet astonishingly, none of that is apparent in the Carney government’s approach to food security, which displays an almost complete disregard for a healthy diet. Diet is only mentioned once, and in passing, in their 27-page document, where it is noted that because of climate and agricultural specialization “not enough fruits and vegetables are produced year-round to meet the full dietary needs and recommended consumption levels of Canadians”; no mention of the unhealthy levels of fat, salt, sugar and red meat in the average Canadian diet, never mind ultra-processed foods.

Indeed, health itself is only mentioned eight times, mostly in a recurring phrase about protecting the health and safety of our food.  But bizarrely, half of those references are found in suggestions to reduce the regulatory burden and thus the costs to the agri-food industry, a position that seems to have been championed by the industry itself.

Even worse, Canada’s Food Guide, issued in 2019, is also only mentioned once and in passing, where it is suggested that “based on Canada’s Food Guide, the domestically-produced share of healthy food available to Canadians will increase from 75% to 85%, by 2032”. Well, that’s fine, but shouldn’t the fundamental aim of the entire agri-food system be to produce a healthy diet, based on Canada’s Food Guide.

 It seems the government is ignorant of – or is choosing to ignore – its own policy initiatives and expertise.  The government could have looked to the 2019 Food Policy for Canada, which set out “a framework to align and coordinate federal food-related initiatives . . . to improve social, health, environmental and economic outcomes.” It could have used the Canada Food Guide as a goal. It could have consulted with its own Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, which was established in 2021 – except that it has not met nor had new members appointed since 2023. 

As Professor Biswas pointed out, it could have linked its food security strategy to the National Agricultural Soil Health Strategy that Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald committed Canada to in March 2026. But not one of these is mentioned in the NFSS.

Frankly, the NFSS comes across as an amateurish report cobbled together by people with a narrow economic understanding of food security – as one might expect from a government headed by an economist. But a national food security strategy that pays scant attention to either field or fork or to the government’s own policies and recommendations is not worth the paper it is written on. The Carney government should try again, this time by talking to people who actually understand the full depth and breadth of food security.

© Trevor Hancock, 2026

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

National food security? Not without natural security

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

The federal National Food Security Strategy lacks important discussion on how our current agri-food system harms the environment.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

28 June 2026

701 words

The Carney government recently released its National Food Security Strategy (NFSS). Unfortunately, the strategy only serves to show that the government doesn’t really understand food security, particularly when it comes to the environment and health, neither of which figure much in the strategy. I will discuss the neglect of the environment in this column and the neglect of health in a future column.

It should be glaringly obvious that ultimately food security depends upon having a healthy environment, and that producing food in environmentally harmful ways undermines food security. Yet not only does the word ‘environment’ only appear ten times in the 27-page strategy, eight of those times are not actually about the natural environment but about the technology of ‘controlled environment agriculture’, meaning greenhouses.

Nowhere in the NFSS is there a discussion of the way in which our current agri-food system harms the environment. Yet the October 2025 second report of the EAT-Lancet Commission on a healthy, sustainable and just food system (The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals) noted that when it comes to the transgression of planetary boundaries for many of the nine Earth systems that are vital for life on Earth: “food is the single largest cause of planetary boundary transgressions, driving the transgression of five of the six breached boundaries.” (Since then we have crossed a seventh boundary, ocean acidification, to which agriculture also contributes).

Specifically, the Commission reported, agriculture accounts for 85 – 90 percent of total pesticide use and 73 percent of total antimicrobial use, while it contributes around half to three-quarters of flows of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface waters, which cause algal blooms and dead zones. Agriculture is also responsible for two-thirds of all freshwater use, while “Unsustainable land conversion, particularly deforestation, remains a major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change.” In addition, agriculture contributes 30 percent of all human-generated CO2 emissions that cause global heating, and a quarter of the CO2 emissions that contribute to ocean acidification.

Good luck finding much of that in the NFSS. Pesticides are only referred to in terms of making it easier to use them, while anti-microbials are not mentioned at all. Nitrogen is mentioned once in passing, phosphorus not at all, and fertilizers only in terms of problems with supply and improving availability. The word water, bizarrely, does not appear once in the report, nor does biodiversity or ocean acidification or – even more bizarrely – greenhouses gases or carbon/ CO2 emissions.

Yet these environmental effects, to which Canada is a significant contributor (the NFSS notes Canada is “the world’s ninth largest exporter of agri-food products”) have a large and growing impact on food security. Climate change alone is a major concern, as a recent joint Food and Agriculture Organization/ World Meteorological Organization report notes. The combination of rising temperatures and heatwaves, drought and water scarcity “represent a systemic risk to global food security and to the livelihoods of more than 1.23 billion people who rely on agriculture.”

Yet the NFSS only mentions climate change four times, and only in the context of it being one of “the global issues beyond Canada’s ability to directly control” that are impacting our agri-food system and increasing costs. No suggestion here that Canada bears any responsibility for climate change or that it could do something about it by reducing the agri-food system’s greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps that is because the Carney government’s policies are moving Canada away from our climate change targets and are increasing our fossil fuel extraction and exports.

Add to that the impacts on food supply and food quality of ocean acidification, algal blooms and dead zones due to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, as well as widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics and food chain contamination with plastic nano-particles and it is clear that our current agri-food system creates environmental insecurity.

In a largely overlooked October 2025 speech, David McGuinty, the Minister of Defence, explained that “Our security and our prosperity are fully dependent on a healthy and functioning environment” before concluding that “Our national and natural security are inextricably linked.” That certainly applies to our food security, but the new national Food Security Strategy disastrously fails to make that connection.

© Trevor Hancock, 2026

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Food for thought – and for the planet and our health

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

The modern industrial agri-food system not only fails to ensure food for all, it also delivers a diet that makes us sick and kills us early.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 May 2026

700 words

Food is a fundamental need: No food, no life. But in addition to having something to eat, food also must be nutritious and safe – it should not make us sick – and it has to be available to everyone.

Unfortunately, the modern industrial agri-food system not only fails to ensure food for all, it also delivers a diet that makes us sick and kills us early. Moreover, it produces food in ways that are enormously harmful to the planet. All this is documented in the October 2025 report of the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable and just food systems.

The Commission was established in 2018 by The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, and EAT, a Norwegian science-based global platform for food system transformation. The Commission showed that our agri-food system is deeply implicated as a major contributor to the transgression of planetary boundaries for many of the nine Earth systems that are vital for life on Earth.

Their report states: “food is the single largest cause of planetary boundary transgressions, driving the transgression of five of the six breached boundaries.” (Since October 2025 it has been determined we have crossed a seventh boundary, ocean acidification, to which agriculture also contributes).

In terms of toxins, agriculture accounts for 85 – 90 percent of total pesticide use and 73 percent of total antimicrobial use, while it contributes around half to three-quarters of flows of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface waters, which cause algal blooms and dead zones. Agriculture is also responsible for two-thirds of all freshwater use, while “Unsustainable land conversion, particularly deforestation, remains a major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change.” In addition, agriculture contributes 30 percent of all human-generated CO2 emissions that cause global heating, and a quarter of the CO2 emissions that contribute to ocean acidification.

In addition to being a massive contributor to unsustainable ecological changes, our agri-food system is already suffering the consequences of those changes. Climate change alone is a major concern, as a recent joint Food and Agriculture Organization/ World Meteorological Organization report notes. The combination of rising temperatures and heatwaves, drought and water scarcity “represent a systemic risk to global food security and to the livelihoods of more than 1.23 billion people who rely on agriculture.”

Add to that the impacts on food supply and food quality of ocean acidification, algal blooms and dead zones due to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, as well as widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics and food chain contamination with plastic nano-particles and it is clear that our current agri-food system is ecologically unsustainable.

Not only that, but this unsustainable system does not produce a healthy diet. On the contrary: “More than half of the world’s population struggles to access healthy diets, leading to devastating consequences for public health”, the Commission states.

But the good news is that a shift to a ‘Planetary Health Diet’ (PHD), as proposed by the EAT-Lancet Commission, can not only markedly improve the health of the population but can dramatically benefit the environment.

Derived solely on the basis of the evidence as to what constitutes a healthy diet, the PHD is “rich in plants: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes comprise a large proportion of foods consumed, with only moderate or small amounts of fish, dairy, and meat recommended.” Such a diet, the Commission estimated, would avoid “an estimated 15 million deaths per year among adults (27% of total deaths) . . . globally” – and that is probably an underestimate.

Not included are the additional deaths and diseases caused by agriculture’s contribution to air pollution (about 650,000 deaths annually), climate change, use of pesticides, nitrogen pollution of water, antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk.

Importantly, the Commission notes, producing such a diet through sustainable and ecological intensification of the food system reduces “agricultural land area, water

consumption, and nitrogen use, and substantially reduces greenhouse gas emissions”; pesticide and antibiotic use would also be markedly reduced.

It is time the federal and provincial Ministries of Agriculture and Food insist that our national and provincial agri-food systems focus on the Planetary Health Diet, on what is good for people and the planet, not just on profit and corporate power.

© Trevor Hancock, 2026

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy