When supply chain collides with food chain, local food security warning lights start flashing.
For B.C., those warning lights might not be flashing red today, but they should at least be flashing orange for governments, grocers, growers and consumers as food and production input prices continue to rise.
However, there are potential silver linings to the current supply chain-food chain complications.
For one, they have forced anyone interested in building back better to consider how they and the province might develop ways to reduce the impact of the current threats to local food security and ensure those threats are progressively eliminated when future supply chain disruptions occur.
In short, take another step in diversifying B.C.’s economy away from its reliance on being a drawer of water and a hewer of wood.
For example, opportunities in the rapidly developing field of agritech abound, and B.C. is well placed to exploit them. Its climate and agriculture are diverse. The province also has abundant clean water and clean energy, and it is home to an increasingly deep tech talent pool.
Broadly speaking, agritech, as described in Invest Vancouver’s Agritech Today, Building for Tomorrow report, is technological innovation “in the farm sector with the aim of improving production, profitability and sustainability.”
That is an key trio of factors to improve in the local and global food security arena. Supply chain collisions with food chain demands are going to continue to occur. They could multiply.
Learning from them and strengthening home core products, services and expertise will help ensure that B.C. not only reduces the collateral damage from those collisions but also prospers from them by building better at home and selling what it perfects at home in the wider world, where other regions are also facing more food security constraints and complications.
That is more than food for thought as life in the food chain becomes increasingly complex in the 21st century.
