The supply and cost of shipping containers needs to be dealt with. Ottawa—Making sure the national transportation network is performing well is vital to Canada's export dependent economy, says Murad Al-Katib, President and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. Railways, ports and containers are vital to delivering Canadian goods to foreign customers, he told the Commons international trade committee. Exports are the lifeblood of the economy, making transportation, and specifically rail, ports and containers, the veins and arteries that allow everything to flow. Katib, who chaired the 2018 Economic Strategy Table on Agri-Food that called for Canada to reach $85 billion in farm and exports in 2025, said Canada has a significant agricultural endowment, with some of the best and most productive agricultural lands in the world, making it a world leader in agricultural production and export. “For decades, we've been known as the Canadian breadbasket or the breadbasket of the world. However, in recent years, we've been increasingly known as the first stop on the protein highway. With food, fuel, feed and fertilizer, Canada has what the world needs and wants, and Canadian agriculture is on the front line, providing societal solutions to global challenges in protein, food security and renewable fuels.” Canada will be vital to the FAO's mission to produce the same amount of food in the next 40 years as we have done for the past 10,000 years, he said. “To feed the growing middle class and a world population that will exceed 10 billion, we need to meet that target.” That is what makes our transportation network so important to companies supplying their products to domestic and foreign consumers while creating economic benefits and jobs for Canadians. The growing use of containers to ship those products has become a major issue in recent years become of cost and supply problems, he said. Freight costs have risen sharply due to Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A container that cost $3,000 to ship in 2019 now can cost over $23,000 in certain lanes, which means higher costs for users and consumers around the world. Part of the problem “is the lack of oversight by governments in industrialized countries to establish a playing field for containers, steamship lines and customers that equals a competitive playing field.” There is an infrastructure gap for handling containers in Canadian ports and inland locations that calls for a national infrastructure plan, he said.