Cybersecurity in Digital Agriculture: A National Security Risk?

Canada is a global leader in agri-food with respect to quality, innovation, transparency, food security and social development goals. Maintaining this position will be essential to sustaining economic well-being, to tackling emissions, and to enabling global food security in the coming decades. Access to safe, secure and affordable food at home contributes to domestic tranquility. Resilient international supply chains enable global stability by helping countries impacted by the climate crisis and/or conflict to adapt to fluctuations in food production. Consequently, food security can be thought of as an element of national security for both the net exporter and the net importer. The capacity of agricultural production, processing and distribution to meet the demands of this century is being enabled by digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), which are changing how we produce and distribute food. Yet, despite the many benefits it may offer, digitally-enabled agriculture and its supply chains include vulnerabilities related to cybersecurity. These vulnerabilities are opportunities for criminal profit-making and for geo-political adversaries to inflict damage at-scale across this critical infrastructure. Among critical infrastructures, the agri-food system is arguably the least cyber mature and is beset by a general lack of awareness and attention to cybersecurity as a focus of research and policy development, or as a best practice for farm business risk management and agri-food business development. As a result of these factors, the agri-food system represents the softest of targets for those seeking to disrupt critical infrastructures, either as part of criminal exploits or non-kinetic military operations, just below the threshold of armed conflict. For example, cyber-enabled foreign disinformation operations can disrupt Canada’s food production, impact food safety, hurt our global brand and cost money. In this sense, inattention to the cybersecurity and cyber preparedness of this sector represents a less than obvious national security threat meriting attention. In addition to delineating key facets of this threat, we propose a sector-focused framework for enhancing preparedness and resilience.