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    Evan Fraser

    Evan Fraser headshot

    Executive Director and Full Professor, Arrell Food Institute

    College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics

    frasere@uoguelph.ca
    Buffers. Food. Crisis
    Arrell Food Institute

    Research Areas

    • Agriculture and Food
    • Food systems
    • Global Change
    • Sustainable agriculture

    Evan Fraser FRSC FRCGS Executive Director, Arrell Food Institute, and Professor of Geography, University of Guelph

    Evan Fraser is one of Canada's most cited scientists working on food systems, climate change, and agricultural sustainability, with an h-index of 70 and more than 21,000 citations. His research advances a single core argument: the efficiency of modern food systems is central to their fragility. By optimising for productivity and cost, we have eliminated the redundancy, diversity, and slack. These are the buffers that allow food systems to absorb shocks. Understanding how those buffers work, and how to build them, is the thread connecting his research, policy work, and public writing.

    Fraser holds three national fellowships. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (FRCGS), and a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. He served as inaugural co-chair of Canada's Food Policy Advisory Council and sits on the Steering Committee of the UN's High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN). He is the only academic on the executive committee of the Canadian Alliance for Net Zero Agri-Food (CANZA), alongside past and present CEOs of RBC, Loblaw, Maple Leaf Foods, McCain Foods, and Nutrien. In 2024, he was awarded a "policy trailblazer" award by the Canadian Science Policy Centre.

    He has authored or edited six books, including Empires of Food (Simon & Schuster, James Beard Award finalist) and Dinner on Mars (ECW Press, Gold Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards), and served as lead editor of the world's first peer-reviewed textbook in cellular agriculture (Elsevier, 2023).

    He is co-editing a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B with Sir Charles Godfray (Oxford) and is at work on Reasonable Catastrophe, a book on why food systems collapse.

    His public education platform, Feeding Nine Billion, has reached more than 765,000 viewers on YouTube. He writes at Substack: Buffers. Food. Crisis.

    Selected Op-eds

    1. In Carney’s new world order, Canada’s opportunity is as a breadbasket (Globe and Mail, Jan 21, 2026)
    2. You can’t have national security without food security. Can Canada really achieve both? (Toronto Star, March 20th, 2026)

    3. Our stomachs are where we'll feel this trade war most (Globe and Mail, Feb. 7, 2025)

    4. Evan Fraser: A plea to the new B.C. government — do not forget about agriculture (Vancouver Sun, Nov. 12, 2024).

    5. Why is Canada falling behind in agriculture and food production? (Globe and Mail, Oct., 2024)

    6. Sierra Leone is working to transform its food system, but it faces mounting challenges (The Conversation, Sept. 17, 2024)

    7. B.C. could become a food superpower. Instead, we are losing entire crops (Vancouver Sun, Aug., 2024)

    8. Our fragile food supply chain was built for a world that no longer exists (Globe and Mail, July, 2024)

    9. B.C. must build a home-grown, resilient food system (Vancouver Sun, April 2024)

    10. Cultivating change: unleashing Canada's agri-food potential (Canadian Science Policy Centre, Oct. 2024)

    Videos and Audio

    • CBC Ideas show on the Dust Bowl I produced and wrote.
    • NY Climate Week talk on Food Systems Crisis

    • For a complete list go to: Feeding Nine Billion

    Select Publications

    For a full list of publications, visit Evan's google scholar profile.

    Popular Writing

    • Dinner on Mars
    • A Martian menu that could transform how we eat on Earth
    • Empires of Food
    • The Walrus "How to Feed Nine Billion"
    • CNN Blog

    Podcasts

    The hidden power of food: Finding value in what we eat http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-hidden-power-of-food-finding-value-in-what-we-eat-1.4414810

    Utopian Dinner Table: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/utopian-dinner-table-how-to-feed-the-world-in-100-years-1.4971915