The Current - "Lentil King" wants Canadian businesses to think bigger

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Murad al-Katib started his pulse crop business in his basement. Now it's worth $3B a year and in 120 countries. At a time when many Canadian businesses are trying to diversify their markets, and get into value-added manufacturing, al-Katib's company AGT has actually done it. He's built rail infrastructure, manufacturing businesses, and partnerships around the world. He talks about the secret of his success, and why Canadians one day may thank Donald Trump for shaking us out of our complacency.

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Tariffs are upending trade with our biggest trading partners, the United States and China. And so here at the current, we are going to have a series of conversations with business leaders from across this country to hear their ideas on how Canada can survive and thrive in a global economy that seems more competitive than ever. Today, we start on the prairies with the lentil can. of Saskatchewan. Marad al-Katib is the CEO of AGT Foods, one of the biggest producers of pulses in the world. Before that, he was a trade official for the provincial government, helping to bring Saskatchewan products to new markets, and Marad al-Katib is in our Regina studio. Good morning. Good morning. How, from your perspective, how big of a threat do tariffs

from the United States, from China, and other major markets pose to the agricultural sector of this country right now. You know, Matt, I think that, you know, there's kind of a global reset of the world order of trade. And, you know, for a very long time, you know, we've been quite used to the open market access, the free trade regimes that have been, you know, kind of governing. But, you know, what we're seeing now is, you know, the tariffs are really disrupting the trade flows. They're having the industry and, you know, not only in agriculture, but around all industries, we have to rethink, you know, what are the long-term sustainable trade levels in each region and country? And how do we make sure that we're able to maintain our markets that are currently there?

And how do we grow and still distribute that growth into markets that reliably will have market access for Canada? Can I ask a bit more just about how we got here? You have said in past that in some ways we were complacent, that we had it so good that we had fallen behind in diversifying trade. How do you see that in terms of our relationship with the United States? Well, you know, I think there's a one misperception. I mean, I think that people are saying, well, we have to trade less with the United States. It's not about trading less with the United States. It's about trading that growth that we're going to have in our economy with other nations.

And so, you know, again, you know, I have been as a business leader a little bit maybe controversial to say to the Canadian industry, look, we are, you know, now feeling the pain of the complacency that we felt and that we've displayed over. over the last number of decades. We had the largest economy in the world right at our doorstep. We had free market access. The easiest trade, Matt, was the United States. It was the least expensive. It was the least amount of effort.

And it was a profitable market. So, you know, again, sensible to take that opportunity, you know, as it's kind of low-hanging fruit, but maybe not so sensible to not be thinking about what are the future growth potentials? How do we balance? Concentration risk. of clients is a concern for any business in anything that you do in the world. Why is the trade

of our nation any different? That level of concentration was certainly something that always worried me, not only as a trade official in government, but when I started my company, it's something that I was very deliberate to try and make sure that I didn't fall into that trap over time. I want to get to that in a moment, but you talk about controversial. You have also said that one day we may come to thank Donald Trump. I think it's hard for a lot of people right now in the midst of tsunami, tornado, turmoil, whatever you want to call it. It's hard to imagine that we would thank him for what we're seeing right now. But what would we thank him for down the line, do you think?

I mean, you know, the future of the Canadian economy, you know, is balanced trade. We have a productive capacity that is a blessing with the natural resources of this country, with the work ethic of Canadians, and, you know, with the opportunity for us to reach global markets. we may thank Donald Trump for not only slapping us in the face but punching us directly in the nose to get industry and get government and get our economy recognizing that the economy of the future is going to be heavily weighted in the growth markets or the emerging markets of the world and we have to get there. We have to sustain our presence there and we have to find a way to find market access and we have to get there, stay there and be vigilant and not give up if things get resolved in the near term with the U.S. I want to talk about how you have done this. What made you think that lentils and peas were a good business to be? And how does somebody become the lentil king? You know, as a child growing up to an immigrant family in rural Saskatchewan, every third field I would see was summer follow.

So we would grow wheat, and then we would grow canola. And then after the canola, because we use so much nitrogen fertilizer, we would actually have to leave the soil to black dirt to replenish itself naturally. The alternative to that was to plant a legume, a lentil, a chickpea, a pea, a bean that fixed nitrogen in the soil didn't require nitrogen fertilizer and actually was incredibly strong for soil health and was a crop that was in great demand around the world. So putting that together, protein demand in emerging markets, rising incomes in the growth markets of the world, lack of arable land and water, and the need for better soil health in Canada, that actually just made sense to me. And so I still remember going to my wife, Michelle.

She was six months pregnant with our twins. I quit my job in government, told her we were starting a lentil company. Her first question was, what are lentils? And the second question was, how are we going to pay our bills and put diapers on our kids and feed our children? Both fair questions. Both fair questions for sure. But, you know, ultimately what we saw is that 15 million acres of summer follow in Western Canada has now transitioned to pulses. And so, you know, my bet was right.

And we've been able to scale our company to about 4,000 employees around the world and really helped to commercialize this agricultural renaissance that happened. And it was very heavily focused on markets outside of North America because that's where the consumption was. You know, man, I say to people, I'm up to my eyeballs and alligators, but they're only small alligators and no one alligator is going to bite my leg off. That's what trade diversification is, is, you know, having enough access to a bunch of different places so that no one disruption can cripple your company and no one disruption should cripple

our nation's economy. I don't know whether you would call India an alligator, but you have had experience with this before. India put, what, a 30% tariff on lentil imports? Is that right? Yeah, it was actually 30 on lentils, 40 on chickpeas, and 60 on peas. That was back in 2017. What did you learn from that experience? Something that perhaps would help us understand how, to deal with what we are in the midst of right now? Look, we have to recognize that agriculture is the most political business in the world. Farmers are needing to be protected by governments. Rural votes elect governments.

So that's one part of the policy regime that is always in the mind of a government. The second, though, is food inflation and food availability and food security. And so, you know, what I learned in that last crisis is that, you know, we've got to recognize that, you know, trade is not a one-way street where we drive by and we trade with a nation and we put our products in there and we have a market and then we just go home. Trade in today's world is two-way trade, two-way investment flows. And you know, you need to be important in that country in order to insulate yourself. So if I look at, you know, where we are today and as Canada with India, I feel like we're in a great spot. I mean, India is going to be a very important part

of giving us a China balance, giving us a balance on the United States relationship. You know, we have Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Carney restarted diplomatic relations. We now have, you know, Canada's pension funds as big investors in India. You know, companies like Fairfax Financial, my partner, you know, Prem Watsa, you know, who's been an incredible Canadian champion, you know, taking a big ownership stake in my company and allowing me to really invest in the emerging markets business. makes us much more important today. So two-way trade and investment is the dialogue now. It's not just about how do we trade with India or how do we trade with a nation. And, you know,

I think that that's, you know, kind of the dialogue change that is going to be important. We have to recognize that they will protect their farmers. They will have quotas. They will have tariffs potentially. But what we want is we want predictable trade relationships. We want predictable outcomes. And when government policies change, we want them to be, again, predictable. So I'm a real strong advocate of bilateral relationships. I mean, we got in this country, you know, kind of sidetracked in, let's say, 20 years ago with the whole multilateral trade, you know, WTO and all these other things. And then in the, say, 2015 period, we were all about bilaterals. But the bilateral trade availability at that time was limited. I mean, we had some agreements, Jordan. You know what,

no offense to the Canadian government, but I didn't, you know, wake up one morning and, you know, dance in my bedroom because we had a free trade agreement with Jordan. It's a great one, but it's not one that's going to move the needle. So what I think we have now, Matt, is an opportunity where the resetting of the world order of trade will give Canada an opportunity to be important. What do we have, potash, agri, uranium, natural resources, innovation, and we're a gateway into that United States market, you know, assuming that we get the U.S. agreement solved, which I think we ultimately will. Gateway is an interesting word because you've talked about other, and I want to come back to

India, but you've talked about other gateway countries, Turkey, Singapore, Saudi Arabia. What would Canada gain from building trade relationships with those nations? Listen, gateways are now nations that have established a regional importance far beyond their local market. What you get is a multiplier effect. You know, we started to invest in Turkey in 2009. You know, it was a $100 million company that we bought back then. Today, it's a $1.2 billion company that we own there. You know, Turkey is feeding that entire region.

It's the food corridor. The UAE is a small nation. that has now built a port infrastructure and a reach into the entire GCC and is becoming a corridor to Asia. Singapore, of course, similar, you know, not only a tech hub, but a shipping hub. And Saudi Arabia, with the policies of MBS are certainly going to be, in my mind, a very successful strategy as a gateway to Africa. And, you know, many of us talked about this being a century for Africa. here we are 25 years into the century, and we haven't seen that potential realized yet, but it will be at some point in this century.

You know, I had an opportunity last Tuesday to meet with Prime Minister Carney and our Minister of Trade, and, you know, certainly I'm advocating the Gateway's strategy, which I think is really something that would benefit the trade diversification initiative for Canada. Are there moral considerations when you look at strengthening ties with some of those nations, Some of them are not democratic. Some of them have seen democratic backsliding. India and the highest levels of the Indian government has been accused of killing a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. How do you think about that as you look at deepening those relations? Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, ultimately that's that's always the catch 22, right? You know, we have a Canadian, you know, philosophy and a Canadian morality and I certainly have that and I try and govern myself and my business that way. I think that there has to be a recognition, though, that, you know, again, sovereign nations, you know, have their own policies. And as we try and become morality-centric in our relationships and we try and, you know, dictate to other nations, it hasn't been a very successful strategy.

I was going to say, do you think that's hurt Canada in the past? It certainly has. I mean, look at when we are sitting here, you know, with our own problems and our own nation. And, you know, again, I want to ensure that I remind governments and I remind our citizens that, you know, in the inner city of Regina, we have children who are going to school every morning to rely on their school breakfast and school lunch because it's the only meals they're getting in a day. So from that perspective, we have our own problems. Let's just put it that way. We should be focusing on our problems. We should be focusing on building a nation that gives, you know, better life and better quality of life for Canadians.

And I think we have to recognize that a functioning economy allows us to truly embrace and spread the Canadian ideals that we want within our nation. So, you know, I always say, you know, people who say, oh, I want, you know, health care and I want education and I want, you know, the most vulnerable to have access. Well, I do, too. But we need a functioning economy in order to do that. governments don't print money and governments can't tax and just redistribute. We have to create new wealth. And the economy functioning and new markets and new opportunities is what ultimately will fuel us to have a better way of life for Canadians who are coming generations ahead.

Why do bad mothers make for such compelling stories? According to the writer Emma Knight, the messiness of motherhood is exactly what makes it interesting. And we talked all about that on my podcast bookends. Every week on the show, I sit down for honest conversations with today's literary stars. We cover a lot of different ground about their lives, their inspirations, their writing. And, of course, also we talk about their mothers. If you have a mom good or bad, you should check out bookends with Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. When you spoke with the prime minister, I mean, one of the things that he has talked a lot about is this idea of big nation building projects.

I don't know whether you directly address that in your conversation with him, but what would you want him to invest in in this country right now? Well, we certainly did talk about it. And, you know, from my perspective, agriculture is the most tangible sector of our economy. It is a sector that has the ability to deliver tens of billions of dollars of economic growth in the very near term with very limited investments because our farmers have embraced technology and innovation, precision farming.

Our yields are going up. getting more efficient at how we produce than we're feeding the world. So it's a sector that I would double down on, but we need to start to transition to value added processing. That means, I mean, how do we take commodities and how do we, you know, add value to them? How do we transition them into ingredients, into refined food products or semi-refined food products? This is what you do, right? You don't just sell lentils and chickpeas. You sell packaged food for retail. Absolutely. And even, you know, packaged foods for ingredients. I mean, when we take lentils and we clean them, size them, color sort them, de-stone them, put them through magnets and metal detection,

and we ship them even in one-ton bags, they're going directly to a packaging company where it goes into a package that goes directly to the consumer. Or in our retail packing plants in LaValle, Quebec, and our canning plants in Canada, we can them and we put them on the retail shelves, you know, in North America and around the world. So, you know, that's the way that you start to insulate yourself, too, away from these commodity-focused tariffrafer. regimes, right, like the Indian tariffs, like the Chinese tariffs on canola, that allows the sector to have a lot more resilience, a lot more cash flow. Cash is king in any business. The other thing I did, you know, talk about with the prime minister, and, you know, again,

I'm very encouraged is that, you know, we are going to see a sustained focus on building the trade infrastructure of our nation. You know, how could we think of how we're going to trade 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, when we haven't even moved the rail lines out of the center of Western Canadian cities to get to the port of Vancouver. You're also involved in this, right? And in building rail infrastructure? Yeah, absolutely. I've been, you know, very involved in building shortline railway infrastructure.

Our company was instrumental in fixing up the Churchill Railway to reconnect indigenous communities in northern Manitoba. So we partnered with the government on getting that bought from Omni Tracks in Denver, Colorado. we fixed it, we trained the employees, and then we turned it over to the First Nations communities in northern Manitoba. So that was, you know, a great project. One day it will be in my memoirs of, you know, a project that I truly believe was nation building and true, you know, indigenous participation in the economy. And one now that's attracting attention to the federal government on an Arctic gateway that's important for not only trade proximity to Europe, but also for

Arctic sovereignty. But, you know, we need to, Matt, look at all our gateways and corridors. You know, the metro Vancouver region is an urban center with great population. It can't handle all our cargo and all our growth. Port of Prince Rupert is going to be a very key corridor for us. We believe that containers and intermodal, which is going to be the things that will house and transport those value-added food products and value-added manufactured goods to nations around the world, those are those 20-foot and 40-foot boxes that you see on trains that ultimately go on vesting. That's the method of shipping products that are value added or that need to be segregated that don't get shipped by big bulk vessels.

We have to develop Vancouver for that, Prince Rupert, as I mentioned, but also Halifax. We have to develop Montreal, and we have to take advantage of our Great Lakes. They're an underutilized shipping corridor. So as a nation, we're going to have tens of millions of tons of additional production in our natural resources sector. We've got to get what belongs in pipes and pipes. We've got to get what belongs on rail on rail, and we have to develop the port infrastructures in a cohesive long-term strategy. Do you think more individuals or more companies should be thinking at the scale that you are rather than waiting for somebody else, some level of government to do it for them? Well, certainly, you know, we're seeing it, right? Companies are investing in their first mile and, you know, we're partnering with government and the railways themselves to develop what's in between, and we're seeing private sector investment in ports.

I mean, DP World, you know, out of the Emirates has become a big investment. or in the Canadian ports infrastructure. So we are seeing movement. And for people who are concerned about that who say this shouldn't be, this is of the public good, this is a public service that we shouldn't have the private sector involved.

What do you say to them? Well, I don't think it's going to get built, one, and number two, I don't think it will actually be properly functioning if it's not connected to the first mile. I mean, the manufacturing, processing, the mines, the farms are ultimately what will feed the traffic. that ultimately goes into an efficient supply chain. So you can't have it without the participation of the planned infrastructure that connects.

I mean, when I look at what I did, I built 600 kilometers of connected short line railway infrastructure in Saskatchewan, you know, that ultimately was spotting rail cars out to rural communities so that they could get their grain to the world market. So we were densifying, you know, traffic that was in rural and remote areas and putting them into a collection system that fed CN railways. It's, you know, kind of been lauded as one of the more innovative, you know, transportation models in North America or maybe in the world.

And it's become a very successful model. So, so anyway, the prime minister's listening, though. I was very encouraged. You know, I joked with him that, you know, during the campaign, you know, I was quoted in national media saying, if I was prime minister for a day, I'd invest $100 billion in trade infrastructure. And the prime minister, you know, winked at me and said it might not be that much, but we're definitely going to do a lot.

Let me just ask you a few more things before I let you go. One is, this is not about stoking regional differences or anything like that, but are the things that you think decision makers in the East or in urban centers don't understand about the economic potential in the West and in rural communities, particularly when it comes to agriculture? Because we will often see huge amounts of money and investment going into the auto sector, for example.

And again, I'm not pitting one. against the other, but you'll talk to people who are farming canola and they will feel like they have been shut out when they take a look at what's happening in southwestern Ontario. Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, that regional disparity thing, you know, has played out a lot, you know, especially in politics. What we've seen, though, in the last, you know, call it six months is we've seen a, you know, very different political landscape. I mean, you know, I can tell you, it's been incredible sitting as a business leader in Saskatchewan and seeing Doug Ford, you know, advocating for Western Canadian natural resources and agriculture.

You know, again, there's a relationship between Scott Moe and Doug Ford that, you know, we haven't seen between regional premiers. And, you know, again, our Tuesday meeting in Ottawa was Premier Mo and myself and a number of business leaders meeting with the prime minister and three members of his cabinet to talk about canola and China and to talk about the development. element of the ag sector to talk about market access and market diversification. Those meetings didn't happen. You know, we believe that that meeting with Prime Minister Carney was one of the first commodity-focused meetings with a Prime Minister in the last 20 years in Canada. That is a staggering

thing. I'm optimistic. We've got to break down our regional trade barriers, get free trade going between our provinces. We've got to realize the potential of our own economy, and we've got to diversify our trade internationally. And that has to be a sustained focus that we cannot take our eye off that ball because the next generation needs us to be very successful in that strategy. And I think we will be. You said something earlier that there will at some point of time, you hope, be a trade deal with the United States. But your suggestion, I think, was not to take your foot off the accelerator, right, when that deal is reached. This is an opportunity that has to go beyond simply some sort of agreement with the U.S. Well, I think that, you know, my worry always,

is that, you know, we'll get that deal with the U.S. and that, you know, ultimately the businesses will continue to say, okay, now we have access again. Now we don't have to worry about the ASEAN region and Western Europe and the Middle East and, you know, Africa. No, we need to keep our foot on the gas and recognize that another U.S. president someday in the future could do the exact same thing to us again.

Now, what I did say, my optimism is, we will get a Kusma compliant extension deal in 2026. You know, that's a very, very key element. element of our trade. And that transition to new markets isn't going to happen overnight. We became this reliant on the U.S. over 50 years. It's going to take us 10 or 20 years to diversify our growth away from it. Now, just remember what I keep saying. Diversifying our growth doesn't mean trading less with the U.S. We need to trade more with the U.S., but our productive capacity will go up so much that I want to trade that growth with other nations. That's what I want to do to make us more

resilient, more predictable, and to have the wealth for generations to come. And that's the thing that you think we'll thank Donald Trump for in the future. That's what I think we're going to thank him for in the future. Your mom was a politician. She was elected to a rural council. Is that right? That's true. First immigrant Muslim woman elected to a rural council in Canadian history in 1976, a Turkish immigrant woman who learned to speak English watching Sesame Street with us kids. You know, certainly she was a pioneer in, you know, kind of advocating for the farm and rural communities and agriculture. And that's probably where I got my bug for wanting to start a company and do what I'm doing.

You ever want to follow her? Will we see you in politics? Will we see the lentil king in politics? You know what? The best place for a guy like me is on this side of the fence. I do my business and I try and dedicate days to public policy. I'm sticking where I am. I want to create jobs.

I want to create wealth. And I want to give sound advice to government, not needing. anything from them. I'm really glad to have had the chance to talk to you. This was fascinating, and I hope we get the opportunity to speak again. In the meantime, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Murat Al-Katib is the CEO of AGT Foods, one of the world's biggest producers of Pulses, also known, as we said, as the lentil king of Saskatchewan, he was in Regina. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.