The Centre's involvement in the Agri-Food Competitiveness Council and related work on competitiveness has exposed us to a multitude of issues and ideas about how to improve competitiveness. With the completion of GATT and NAFTA, a new policy environment is unfolding. To acknowledge it, we want to lay out some lessons we have learned that may help the sector become all it can in the future. Our objective is to define things which farms, firms and government can do to achieve competitiveness. We will do it in instalments over the next few newsletters. We begin in this issue by describing the principles we believe are important for organizations to follow in being successful, and by describing our vision for the agri-food sector of the future. In later issues we address the three factors which will be of particular importance in shaping the sector's future: international trade policy; domestic and international market segmentation; and process technology. We then complete our basic framework with a SWOT analysis of the sector; i.e. its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Finally, we identify the structural and policy changes needed to take advantage of our opportunities and strengths, while minimizing the effects of our weaknesses and threats in order to achieve the vision.