Tools · AgriMarketing eligibility
Will AgriMarketing fund an established market?
Not as a rule, and the five-year test is about your sector rather than about you.
Activities aimed at established and traditional markets where the sector has been active for at least five years are ineligible, subject to discussion with the program and assessed case by case.
The test being about the sector is the part that surprises people. A company that has never sold to a market its industry has worked for a decade is not thereby diversifying, and being new to it is not the argument.
It is explicitly case by case and explicitly subject to discussion, which makes it an argument rather than a wall. But it has to be made deliberately in the application and not discovered during assessment. The program names where it wants diversification to go: priority areas include Africa, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
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"ASEAN entry" is a phrase that costs money. These are six regulators, six registration routes and two entirely different tariff positions, and entering them in the wrong order is how a budget gets spent proving something the first market would have told you. A sequence, and the reasoning behind it.
The other activities
Market research
DependsA trade show booth
DependsTranslation, and label artwork for a market
EligibleLegal advice and trademark protection
DependsCertification obtained to enter a market
DependsYour own staff time
Not eligibleDeveloping or reformulating a product
Not eligibleA new website or brand refresh
Not eligibleEquipment, software or plant
This does not answer CanExport
CanExport SMEs is the other federal program exporters ask about, and it is not covered here. Its rules live on a Government of Canada host that refuses requests from our infrastructure.
Every answer we gave would come from memory rather than from a page we opened and dated.
That is a worse outcome than an absence.
A funding answer is acted on by somebody about to commit money, and the two programs differ on cost share, on who is eligible and on what counts as a fundable activity.
We would rather tell you the gap exists.
Read from
- AgriMarketing Program, Market Diversification for SMEs: 1. What this program offers. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, read 25 September 2026
- AgriMarketing Program, Market Diversification for SMEs: 2. Eligibility. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, read 25 September 2026