My name is Myles Frosst. I am committed to assisting industry, government and academe collectively and collaboratively tackle many of the most pressing challenges faced by the Canadian agri-food sector and by the agrifood-food related challenges, strengths, weakness, and opportunities to ensure that Canada can contribute to the overarching need to produce healthy food in a sustainable way to a growing population.
I believe wholehearted that given the resources at our disposal, the science we have developed, and our understanding of the political, sociological and economic dynamic at work today that we are, collectively and with individual effort, able to meet 21st-century challenges.
As a Visiting Scholar at the University of Guelph, I initiated an interdepartmental research program in 2011 on food security and agri-food competitiveness with Ontario Agricultural College and the College of Management and Economics. He successfully raised the largest single OMAFRA grant to the CME under the “New Directions in Research Program.”
I have led two agri-food sector associations — one representing primary agriculture and food manufacturing business, the other representing the academic and research community. Both required effective financial, human resource, marketing and strategic management skills plus the use of innovative fundraising, team building and communications and web-based collaboration techniques.
While serving the members and clients of the Agricultural Institute of Canada as its CEO from 2006 to 2011, I helped to turn that institution around toward a sustainable financial future. With a team, we led the expansion of the membership base by building trust with senior representatives of the agri-food, renewable fuels, bio-fibres and health sectors across commodity and product lines and throughout individual value chains.
Between 1997 and 2006 I was fortunate to serve as Executive Director to the Canadian Agri-food Marketing Council, an advisory body to the Federal Ministers of Agriculture and Agri-Food and of International Trade. There I collaborated with others to develop consensus among industry leaders, provided members with government policy expertise, and focused their industry-government relations on federal and provincial trade development programs, regulatory policies, and competitiveness strategies. I count as a personal success guiding CAMC through both Conservative and Liberal governments.
I am a political economist by training and graduate of McGill with a background in instruments of public policy, the interface of law with economics, and trade policy negotiations. I count among my many blessings to have been responsible to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade for six different industry sector advisory groups on international trade, including the Agriculture, Food and Beverage advisory group. With the help of a team of diplomats, scholars, and interest groups, I steered them all through the conclusion and implementation of the last successful round of multilateral trade negotiations.