Growing Forward 2, when it comes to science and research, innovation, and marketing, builds on the very strong successes we had under Growing Forward 1. Growing Forward 1 led to the development of the Market Access Secretariat, which has proven that they punch well above their weight in working on technical details, opening trade corridors, and making sure that science-based decisions are applied. We will enhance that in Growing Forward 2.
That's on the market development side. It builds on the work that the whole government is doing on trade and financial investments with other countries and so on to facilitate agriculture. Every free trade agreement that we have signed as a government has expanded our access for agriculture and has been very positive from that standpoint, to the point that we exported a record number of commodities last year with a record value.
We will continue to build on the science and research side coming out of the science clusters. This was the first time ever that industry was involved in developing what the end result should be. Then we started to target the result that industry needed and required and then put together academia, provincial dollars, federal dollars, and industry itself in order to come forward with a complete envelope to deliver the result.
We're no longer going to base research on the volume of research you can do or how many new varieties of potatoes you can do, but on how many are actually wanted by industry and what the traits are that industry is requiring. It's a much more targeted, focused ability to produce.
Over the five-year period of the next Growing Forward suite, starting next April, there will be some $3 billion. That's a tremendous amount of money. It's $600 million per year. It will help us leverage investments from around the world, too, to develop the science and research in that capacity here in Canada, again delivering the results that farmers are asking for. It's very focused, very targeted, with a good, solid pot of money.
I've been talking to a lot of the industry groups. I attended the GrowCanada forum the other night. They're all excited about this and about the ability to move forward. They recognize that we need a reactive suite of programs on the business risk side, but that the future of agriculture relies more on the proactive side—the competitive advantage that science and research will give to farmers, the innovation that will be driven out of it, the efficiencies that will be driven out of it, and then of course coupling this to markets to make sure that we can sell all that great product.