Pulse sector excited about supercluster potential
Saskatchewan’s pea growers live in a harsh world market.
India, the country that buys 40 per cent of the province’s pulse crop, has slapped Canada with skyhigh tariffs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to raise the issue on Friday when he meets with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.
“This is a full-court press by Canada,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said.
“We don’t pretend that a solution is easy, but it’s something that’s very high on our agenda.”
But the real battle for Saskatchewan’s peas won’t be fought in New Delhi. Goodale thinks the crop’s future will be determined right here on the Prairies. Canada’s weapon will be innovation, he suggested, as companies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba become “a magnet for the best brains” in plant protein.
That’s the message he brought to Innovation Place in Regina on Thursday during a panel discussion touting the federal government’s investment in a new protein industries supercluster.
“The whole point of this effort is to make sure we’ve got an industry that is bigger and stronger than any individual problem,” Goodale said. “What we need is an industry that is just so good that if you’re serious about pulses in the world and protein, you’ve got to take this seriously.”
The federal government will invest at least $150 million in the supercluster, which will bring together about 120 businesses, researchers and other organizations to collaborate on new ways to grow, process and market plant proteins.
The private sector must match the public money dollar for dollar, but Goodale is now predicting they may raise as much as five times that amount.
He faced calls to provide a precise definition of the term supercluster, of which there are now five across the country. He declined to do so, telling reporters to imagine a cluster — a geographic network of interconnected businesses — “magnified by a hundredfold.”
“It’s almost impossible to describe it, because by describing it you put a fence around it,” the minister said. “The whole idea of a supercluster is to get rid of the fences.”
Despite the hazy outline, industry leaders were jubilant over Ottawa’s investment and what it will do for lentils, canola and, of course, peas.
Carl Potts, executive director of the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, said the province needs to move beyond shipping bulk commodities to just a few big markets. He hopes researchers will hit on pulse-based protein products with more value added.
“We need to diversify,” he said. “I think that’s what the supercluster will help us do, help to really supercharge or turbocharge the development of new markets, new demand — in pet food, human food, in food service and other areas.”
The goal, he said, is to direct 25 per cent of domestic production to new uses by 2025. He said that will guard against the province’s vulnerability to “price-sensitive markets like India.”
He said the supercluster program will help get new technologies out of laboratories and onto farms.
“In pulses, we’ve funded a lot of research, but it’s been that commercialization link that has been missing,” he said. “I’m really excited to see the level of commercial investment.”
The program has attracted criticism in free-enterprise quarters, with National Post columnist Andrew Coyne arguing it would be more effective to release $950 million onto the streets in five cities across the country. His point was that the federal Liberals aren’t cut out to pick economic winners.
That argument frustrated the supercluster advocates. Goodale said the selection process involved senior civil service experts in science, agriculture and other sectors — not politicians — as well as outside review from the Conference Board of Canada.
University of Saskatchewan president Peter Stoicheff also took umbrage with the critics. He said the feds helped build something where the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“Where’s the evidence that this would happen without the federal government?” he asked.
“What is it, they asked themselves, that Canada can truly be great at? What are those sectors where we can take everything from academia and fundamental research through applied research right out to the marketplace and have a global impact?”
He challenged anyone to come up with a better list than the one the feds drew up. Further, he argued, the five superclusters are complementary, with the protein industry likely to benefit from research in B.C.’s data-driven supercluster. With new analytics, one panellist said, farming is becoming more and more like playing a video game.
Goodale used that idea to coin a buzz phrase. Canada, he said, will now be home to a “supercluster of superclusters.”