Martin Gooch of the George Morris Centre says Canadian
agriculture is missing opportunities to make significant gains from innovation
because of the way government policies and industry attitudes are shaped.
In his most recent publication about value chain management,
Gooch says government policies are too narrowly focused on farmers. It would be
better to encourage supply-chain co-operation and innovation, he says.
Most food-processing companies are still managing their
affairs as individual, competitive businesses rather than seeking ways to
improve relationships with suppliers and customers so they can partner to find
ways to better satisfy consumers, reduce costs, improve efficiencies and
improve quality and cut waste.
For example, Gooch says the federal-provincial five-year Growing
Forward package of programs puts its focus squarely on farmers and their
lobbying for “simple, responsive, predictable and bankable” support programs.
That says nothing about encouraging value chain management.
Gooch says the food industry is lagging behind the
information technology (IT) and automotive sectors where supply chain and value
chain management have brought huge gains.
Gooch says that when Canadian politicians’ investment in innovation
for agriculture is “heavily biased toward science and development” and there is
“comparatively little” spent on “enabling and motivating organizational
innovation.”
Gooch’s report is posted on the George Morris Centre website
at www.valuechains.ca/documents
.
