Standing before the next generation of global leaders in Turkey, Dr.Suman Roy argued that a nation unable to feed its own people cannot negotiate, defend itself, or lead. The argument began not in a conference hall, but on a Scarborough street corner.
Suman Roy had forty-two dollars when he landed in Canada. This February, he was in Istanbul telling world leaders that food insecurity is a national security crisis. As founder of Feed Scarborough and one of Canada’s foremost voices on food security, Roy took the stage at the Ecovay Future Leaders Assembly, a gathering of emerging voices in policy, business, and civic leadership from across the globe. His brief was food security. What he wanted the room to understand is that food security is no longer — if it ever was — simply a humanitarian topic. It is a question of national sovereignty, geopolitical leverage, and the long-term stability of every society on earth.
Roy called the talk “Food Security is not just feeding the hungry, but feeding our Country, in the face of global geopolitical volatility.” That framing was deliberate. He wanted to shift the conversation away from the language of charity and emergency response — necessary as both are — toward something harder and more urgent: the recognition that a country which cannot guarantee its own food supply has already surrendered a portion of its independence.
The room was full of young leaders who will shape trade agreements, write policy, run governments, and build institutions over the next four decades. Roy’s message to them was unambiguous: food security belongs at every strategic table, not just the social services portfolio.
“When a country cannot feed itself, it cannot negotiate from strength. Food is not just sustenance. It is leverage, stability, and sovereignty.” — Suman Roy
The Argument Nobody Wants to Make
The dominant narrative around food insecurity frames it as a welfare issue. Conversations focus on suffering, on children going to bed without dinner, on elderly residents choosing between groceries and medication. All of that is real, and none of it should be minimized. But that framing has a political consequence: it places food security in the ministry of social services rather than in the cabinet room where national strategy is made.
Roy has spent years making the case that this has to change. The evidence of the last decade makes the strategic dimension of food security impossible to ignore.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the brittleness of global food supply chains in ways that should have generated a fundamental policy rethink. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted wheat and sunflower oil supplies that dozens of nations depended on, sending prices spiking across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Nations that had outsourced their food production to cheaper international suppliers discovered that sovereignty over your food system is not an abstraction. It is a survival variable.
Canada has been fortunate as a net agricultural exporter. But the complacency that comes with that position has historically prevented serious thinking about vulnerabilities within Canada’s own borders — including in communities like Scarborough, where the greatest food bank demand in the City of Toronto sits largely unaddressed by national strategic thinking.
What Scarborough Taught Him About Geopolitics
Suman Roy arrived in Canada in 2002 with forty-two dollars. He knows what food insecurity feels like from the inside. He knows the particular anxiety of not being sure how the next week’s meals will be managed. He also knows how quickly that anxiety compounds every other challenge in a person’s life: the job search becomes harder, the health deteriorates, the focus narrows to survival. Food insecurity is not a backdrop to poverty. It is one of its primary engines.
When Roy founded Feed Scarborough in 2018, the organization’s focus was immediate and local: the families in Scarborough navigating a new country, a tight housing market, and a transit system that made getting to a food bank a two-hour round trip. The seniors who could not make that trip at all. The gap between the city’s stated values and what actually existed on the ground in its eastern suburbs.
But the longer Dr. Roy worked at the community level, the more clearly the connection emerged between what happens on a Scarborough street corner and what happens in a cabinet meeting in Ottawa. The decisions made at the macro level — about immigration settlement support, transit investment, housing policy, and how governments value agricultural land — arrive at the micro level as a family deciding whether to visit a food bank. The geopolitics and the grocery list are not separate stories. They have always been the same story.
“The decisions made in the cabinet arrive on the doorstep as a family deciding whether to visit a food bank. The geopolitics and the grocery list are the same story.” — Dr Suman Roy
Three Failures Roy Laid Before Future Leaders
In Istanbul, Dr Roy asked the audience to consider three specific failures of strategic imagination that most governments currently share, and that their generation would have the opportunity — and the obligation — to correct.
The first is the failure to treat domestic food security as infrastructure. Roads, electricity grids, and broadband networks are understood as foundational public goods that governments invest in regardless of short-term economic return. Food systems — local production capacity, distribution networks, community food programs — deserve the same classification. When a government cuts food programming or allows community food infrastructure to atrophy, it is not saving money. It is deferring a much larger cost.
The second failure is the neglect of the last mile. Global food policy conversations focus on production, trade, and supply chains. They rarely focus on the final distance between a food source and a person who needs it. But that last mile is where food security actually lives or dies. A country can have abundant agricultural output and still have communities where people go hungry because the distribution infrastructure does not reach them. Feed Scarborough built its door-to-door online foodbank precisely because the last mile in Scarborough was broken. Roy’s argument is that every government needs to ask that same question about its own territory.
The third failure is the absence of the community voice in national food strategy. The people who understand food insecurity most precisely are those who have experienced it and the organizations working inside the communities where it is most concentrated. Those voices are routinely absent from the rooms where food policy is written. That is not just an equity issue. It is a competence issue. Policy that ignores ground-level knowledge produces policy that does not work.
Canada’s Role and Its Obligations
Roy’s address also turned outward to Canada’s responsibilities on the global stage. As one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, with deep expertise in food systems, logistics, and international development, Canada is positioned to lead on global food security in ways that few nations are. That leadership, Roy argued, has been inconsistent.
The Zero Hunger Goal — UN Sustainable Development Goal Two — is one of the most important and most underfunded commitments in the global development architecture. Roy has been a persistent advocate for ensuring that the coalition pushing to make it real includes not just governments and multilateral institutions but practitioners: the people running food banks, developing urban agriculture programs, training cooks in community kitchens, and building the last-mile distribution systems that the data-heavy policy world tends to underestimate.
Canada’s credibility on this issue internationally, Roy argued, depends in part on what it does domestically. It is difficult to advocate for global food security while the greatest food bank demand in the country’s largest city sits in a neighbourhood that has been chronically underinvested. Canada cannot be a credible voice on feeding the world without first seriously grappling with feeding Scarborough.
“Canada cannot be a credible voice on feeding the world if we have not seriously grappled with feeding Scarborough.” — Dr Suman Roy
The Next Generation’s Assignment
Roy ended his address in Istanbul with a single ask. He asked the young leaders in the room to commit to one thing: to make sure that food security is in the room whenever national strategy is being discussed. Not just at the agriculture ministry. Not just at the social services table. At the national security table. At the trade negotiation table. At the foreign policy table.
Food is the oldest form of power. Civilizations have risen and collapsed on the strength or failure of their food systems. The crises of the past decade — pandemic, invasion, climate disruption, supply chain fragility — have produced enough evidence to know that food security is not a background condition of national life. It is one of its primary determinants.
The generation that will lead the world through the next forty years of climate disruption, demographic change, and geopolitical realignment will need to hold that understanding. Roy’s work in Istanbul was one contribution to making sure they do. His work in Scarborough is another. In his view, they are the same work, at different scales. Both matter. And both are advancing.
Suman Roy is the founder of Feed Scarborough, a community-driven organization serving more than 2,000 residents weekly across Scarborough, Ontario. He has served as a key consultant on the City of Toronto’s Food Strategy and has represented Canada at the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization. His keynote address at the Ecovay Future Leaders Assembly was delivered in Istanbul, Turkey, February 25–28, 2026.
