Anthony Parker’s job is to watch who is investing in Canada’s future crops. Lately, the answer has been fewer and fewer organizations.
Parker is Canada’s Commissioner of Plant Breeders’ Rights, the federal official who grants intellectual property protection to new plant varieties. The role puts him at the exact intersection of agricultural innovation and economics, and from that vantage point, he has spent the past several years watching a trend develop in Canada’s cereal sector that he cannot stop thinking about.
The number of breeders seeking rights on new cereal varieties — both public institutions and private companies — has been falling for roughly three years. Not fluctuating. Falling.
“We’ve looked at the number of filings for plant breeders’ rights for both public varieties and private varieties and they’re both going down and they’ve been on a downward trend for about three years,” Parker says. “If this trend continues there’ll be an absence, a lack of innovation coming to farmers and that’s going to really put them in a precarious predicament.”
For an official whose entire mandate is to encourage innovation in plant breeding, that trajectory is an alarm.
Why Fewer New Cereal Varieties Are Reaching Canadian Farmers
To understand why the trend matters, it helps to understand what plant breeders’ rights actually do.
When a plant breeder develops a new variety, they can apply to the Plant Breeders’ Rights Office for a form of intellectual property protection specific to agriculture. A variety that is new, distinct, uniform, and stable can receive exclusive rights over its propagating material for 20 years. Those rights give the holder legal control over how the seed is produced, sold, and licensed, essentially a patent, but applied to a living organism.
In practice, those rights are what make investment in plant breeding financially viable. Breeding a new cereal variety takes between 7 and 12 years and costs millions of dollars. Without a mechanism to recover that investment, most breeders, whether public or private, cannot justify the work. Plant breeders’ rights represent that mechanism.
A persistent assumption is that this system serves primarily large multinational seed corporations. Parker finds that frustrating.
“It’s been a long-standing misconception that these forms of intellectual property protection only benefit large multinational companies. That’s not the truth. The largest user in the agricultural sector of Plant Breeders’ Rights has actually been Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre, and they benefited from having intellectual property. It protects farmers’ investments, it protects taxpayers’ investments, and allows them a means to license their variety into the marketplace.”
Farmer cooperatives, independent breeders, and small and medium-sized businesses also hold plant breeders’ rights in significant numbers. The system, when functioning, supports exactly the kind of diverse, competitive breeding ecosystem that keeps new cereal varieties flowing to farmers.
That system is no longer functioning the way it should.
What Declining New Cereal Varieties Mean for Canada’s Farmers and Economy
The scale of what is at stake is not abstract.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada — the public institution at the heart of Canadian plant breeding — is responsible for developing varieties grown on approximately 80 percent of all Canadian wheat acres every year. In 2025, AAFC varieties covered 90 percent of Canadian Western Red Spring acres, 64 percent of Canadian Western Amber Durum acres, and 69 percent of Canada Prairie Spring wheat acres. Canadian cereals as a whole generate $11.5 billion in annual export revenue. Wheat breeding alone has been estimated to deliver a benefit-cost ratio of 32 to 1.
And yet AAFC has lost 665 positions in recent cuts, with seven research facilities slated for closure. Richard Cuthbert, one of the country’s most prominent wheat breeders, resigned from the Swift Current research station earlier this year. The Canadian Wheat Research Coalition’s February 2026 report put it plainly: the system faces critical gaps and risks.
“If we don’t see a mechanism for sustainable funding in the public sector, then that’s going down too,” Parker says. “This is an area where change has to happen.”
The private sector is running its own separate calculation, and arriving at a similar conclusion.
“We get the sense that it sort of opened a door to private sector investment where they were willing to take a risk. But if we lack a mechanism to provide rewards for that risk, for that entrepreneurship, which seems to be the case right now, I think we’re on a decline. The evidence kind of suggests that.”
Canada adopted UPOV ’91 in 2015, upgrading its intellectual property framework to the strongest international standard available. In the years that followed, cereal variety filings rose over 50 percent. Private companies that had been reluctant to invest in Canadian cereals began to do so. It looked like a turning point. What Parker is now watching suggests the momentum from that moment has largely exhausted itself without a second structural change to sustain it.
The consequences compound over time in ways that are easy to underestimate. A breeding cross made today will not produce a commercial variety until approximately 2037. The most widely grown Canadian Western Red Spring and durum varieties currently in fields originated from crosses made between 2001 and 2009. Every year the filing trend continues downward is a year subtracted from the future pipeline, invisibly.
History offers a preview of where this leads. Flax acreage on the Prairies has fallen from 1.9 million acres in 2005 to 620,000 acres in 2025. That collapse tracks directly with the erosion of investment in flax breeding programs. When the varieties stopped coming, farmers stopped growing it. What happened to flax is not a hypothetical for new cereal varieties in Canada — it is a documented outcome, already on the record.
How Canada Can Fix the New Cereal Varieties Problem
Parker is careful about one thing: plant breeders’ rights are not themselves the solution. They are a tool. The question is what structure gets built around them.
Two problems need to be solved simultaneously. The private sector needs a reliable royalty mechanism that makes cereal breeding a viable long-term investment — something the current system does not adequately provide. And the public sector needs a funding model that does not collapse every time a federal government trims its budget.
Neither problem is without precedent elsewhere.
Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation, funded through producer levies, generated $423 million in 2024-25 to support agronomic research and variety development. British Columbia’s Summerland Varieties Corporation manages licensing and commercialization of AAFC-developed fruit varieties through a mixed public-private structure. In Quebec, a cooperative apple breeding program distributes royalties back to the community that funds it — including, in one notable case, supporting Mohawk language revitalization through a share of apple variety royalties. The Canadian Wheat Research Coalition has invested $70.5 million into AAFC and university wheat breeding programs since 2020, demonstrating that producer-led funding can be mobilized when the sector is aligned on a problem.
The CFIA updated Canada’s Plant Breeders’ Rights Regulations in May 2026, a step toward closing the gap between Canadian standards and those of peer nations. But regulatory modernization alone does not resolve the underlying economics. A value creation mechanism — end-point royalties, trailing royalties, producer levies, or some combination — is the piece that remains unresolved, and it is the piece that most directly determines whether private investment returns to Canadian cereals.
It Is Not Too Late For Canadian Breeding
What gives Parker a degree of optimism is not policy movement. It is the conversation itself.
For years, the structural problems in Canadian cereal breeding were understood by specialists and largely invisible to everyone else. That has shifted. Growers, seed companies, and industry organizations are increasingly aligned on the diagnosis — which, in Parker’s view, is the necessary precondition for arriving at a solution.
“More and more there’s recognition from the grower community, from the seed industry, that there’s a problem here. And one thing we know as Canadians is we know how to fix problems. So I think that’s the first step to developing a made-in-Canada solution for funding cereals in this country.”
-Anthony Parker
The pipeline has not run dry. It is slowing — and the gap between those two outcomes is still open. Whether Canada closes it will depend on whether the industry moves before the downward trend in new cereal varieties becomes a permanent feature of the landscape rather than a trend that was caught and reversed in time.
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On the Brink is a cross-country storytelling project about plant breeding in Canada. The goal is to spark an open, multi-perspective, ongoing conversation about what’s possible, what’s at stake, and how to seize opportunities ahead. On the Brink releases new episodes every Wednesday. Watch Episode 6 featuring Andrew Campbell and subscribe to have future episodes delivered directly to your inbox.
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