Thank you very much for the question.
In my opinion, the critical bottleneck in meeting this rising demand for ethnocultural foods sits at both the farm and the processing level. Specifically, having the farmers who are tooled up and prepared and able to meet these markets—even aware of these markets—is a critical first step.
I think the best way of overcoming this bottleneck is to encourage new immigrants to Canada, who come often with a background in farming, and to develop policies and tools to encourage them to set up farm enterprises to meet this demand. I think there is a logical continuum between the new immigrant coming to Canada with a background in farming and the aging rural population of the current generation of farmers. But as I said in my opening remarks, there are a number of barriers that prevent this from happening, including the question how on earth a new Canadian gets access to or becomes aware of a farmer who is retiring and is thinking of passing on the farm.
I think there are a number of things we can learn, and there are a number of models out there based on the idea of having an incubator farm set up by a third party—some sort of NGO—that can help bridge this gap.
Then there is the issue, which I have referred to already, of the need for a local processing industry. To turn the peppers into the chutneys or what not requires a level of local processing industry that at present is very difficult to set up because of the regulatory environment and the cost of set-up. That's another area in which I think there is a bottleneck that some sort of federal-level incentive could help overcome.