George Poulakidas is Senior Advisor, Policy and Engagement, at Genome British Columbia.

In Canada, “security” is no longer confined to national defence. There is recognition that true security depends on our ability to maintain  affordable food, healthy communities, resilient ecosystems, reliable supply chains and a vibrant economy that can absorb shocks.

Under this scope, food systems are a primary security concern.

Food is where shocks show up first and hit hardest. Climate volatility, emerging pests and pathogens, supply bottlenecks and price spikes are no longer rare events. They’ve become part of the baseline. The evidence is clear that climate change is negatively affecting agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, and increasingly hindering efforts to meet human needs.

And Canadians are feeling it in their kitchens.

Statistics Canada reported that 25.5 percent of Canadians lived in households experiencing some form of food insecurity in 2023.

Food price pressure is part of the story too, as food inflation hits quickly and broadly.

The Bank of Canada noted that since 2022, grocery prices have risen by about 22 percent (versus about 13 percent for consumer prices overall).

Households, on average, spend around 11 percent of their budget on groceries, while households in the lowest income quintile spent more than 27 percent of their disposable income on food and non-alcoholic beverages.

The Bank of Canada has highlighted a critical vulnerability: the primary driver of food inflation in 2025 was the rising costs of imported processed foods. This is a clear signal that domestic production must increase. Innovation can significantly help by reducing exposure to import shocks while simultaneously fueling national economic development.

This is why food security can’t be treated as a niche social or sector issue. It’s a systems issue that affects health, economic stability and public confidence. Solving systems issues requires building durable, long-term capacity – not disjointed or short-lived programs.

Science must play a key role and genomics is a standout tool for building that capacity in the food system. By converting biological uncertainty into earlier, more targeted action, genomics allows the food system to become more reliable and productive.

Applying a security perspective to food security prompts critical questions: what do we need to protect, what could destabilize it and how can we prepare?

For food systems, four goals usually matter:

• Availability: enough food, reliably.
• Affordability: households can absorb shocks.
• Safety: contamination and outbreaks are contained fast.
• Resilience: the system recovers quickly from disruptions.

Policy debates often get stuck because they treat these goals separately – agriculture over here, public health over there, supply chains somewhere else.

But in the real world, a disruption cascades. A crop disease hits yields, which hits prices, which hits diets and stress, which hits health, which hits productivity. In addition, when we rely on imported food, we are even more exposed to price volatility and food shortages.

That’s exactly what makes it a “security” issue in the broader sense.

Genomics as an operational tool

Genomics can sound like a lab-bound field. In practice, it’s an operational tool: the ability to read DNA/RNA, detect biological change early and respond with precision.

From a policy angle, genomics strengthens food system security in three main ways.

1. It boosts productivity while building climate resilience.

Genomics accelerates breeding and selection for drought tolerance, heat resilience and disease resistance; traits that help protect yields as climate variability becomes the norm. It also supports improvements in yield stability, input efficiency and crop quality by shortening the cycle from discovery to deployment.

The policy payoff is straightforward: stronger domestic production capacity and fewer losses when conditions swing.

2. It enables earlier, more targeted detection of biological threats.

Genomic surveillance can identify strains, determine whether the pathogen is new to the region or a recurring issue already present locally, track their spread and monitor evolution in the pathogen. This information enables targeted containment instead of late, blunt interventions that cost more and disrupt supply chains.

These are lessons reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic: biological risk doesn’t respect borders, and upstream monitoring is usually cheaper than downstream response.

3. It makes ecosystems and soils measurable – and therefore manageable.

Soil and plant microbiomes influence nutrient cycling, stress tolerance and disease dynamics. Genomics makes these invisible systems visible, helping connect good practices to measurable outcomes. Over time, this supports productivity with fewer inputs and more stability—exactly the kind of resilience we say we want when we talk about security.

Security isn’t only about preventing crises. It’s about reducing unknown variables and shortening recovery periods.

Genomics enables this by supporting:

• Risk sensing (detect earlier).
• Targeted action (respond precisely).
• Learning loops (measure what works and improve faster).

This is the difference between responding after the system breaks versus detecting emerging issues sooner and containing them while they’re still manageable.

Genomics also underpins the next wave of food innovation that can reduce supply vulnerability.

Alternative proteins – whether plant-based, fermented or cultivated – depend on genomics and bioinformatics to select strains, improve yields and enhance nutrition and safety.

These alternatives benefit national food security. By diversifying our protein sources, we reduce our vulnerability to sudden supply chain disruptions and create a pathway for Canadian R&D to translate into domestic manufacturing capacity.

What Canada should do next

To treat food security as a true pillar of national security, we must stop viewing genomic innovations as a scattered set of projects and start treating them as a core systemic capability.

A practical agenda for action looks like this:

• Build sustained genomic surveillance capacity across foodborne illness, plant health and animal health – with clear pathways to what happens when early threats are detected.
• Strengthen research and development commercialization pipelines to help public research reach the field faster, allowing Canada to finally reap the full rewards of its world-class research.
• Invest in data integration that connects genomics with climate, geography and on-the-ground outcomes – so signals become decisions.
• Put in place shared standards and trusted governance so data is interoperable and usable across jurisdictions and sectors.

To be clear, none of this replaces policies and investments to bolster affordability. Food insecurity is also deeply tied to income and other social factors.

But genomics can reduce the frequency and severity of disruptions that push households closer to the edge – and strengthen public health and economic stability at the same time.

Food security is an essential element of a secure society. It protects health, stabilizes the economy and strengthens resilience. Integrating genomics innovation can fortify our food systems and help secure our future against global volatility.

Genomics won’t solve everything. But it’s one of the clearest examples of how science can be made operational for policy. This science can clearly help Canada move from reacting to shocks to preparing for them.

If we want true national security that encompasses food, health, environment and economic stability, genomics must be a strategic capability that we build by design.

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