For decades, China’s enormous appetite for food has been a boon for Canada’s agricultural industry.
But that may be about to change.
In March, China released its Five-Year Plan, a blueprint for the country’s key economic and social priorities for 2026 to 2030.
This year’s plan — the 15th such iteration — identifies food security as a strategic priority. This includes plans to develop domestic seed technology and strengthen domestic grain and livestock production.
Experts say the shift could have serious implications for major agricultural exporters like Canada.
“Food security is among the biggest of [China’s] public policy priorities … right up there with Taiwan and technology development,” said Al Mussell, senior research fellow at the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute think tank.
Major exposure
China is a significant purchaser of Canadian agricultural products.
Canada produces about $200-billion a year of agricultural products. About five per cent, or $10 billion, is sold to China. This makes China the second largest purchaser of Canadian agricultural exports after the United States, at $62 billion.
Canada’s agriculture industry is structured around exports, says Mussell.
“We have capacity in our agriculture and food system built around export of these products. If we get denied export to certain countries, that can hurt us very badly because we’re leveraged to serve those customers.”
“That’s something that I think is an ongoing worry … especially when you’re in this weird period of geopolitical rivalry,” he said.
China has 1.4-billion people to feed, but limited arable land and water. While it is mostly self-sufficient in staples such as wheat, rice and corn, it is heavily reliant on imports for goods such as soybeans and protein.
In the two decades following its 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization, China’s agricultural imports rose from $10.3 billion to over $200 billion.
Beijing has framed food imports as a vulnerability. The country’s Five-Year Plan aims to reduce this risk by investing in everything from bioengineering to large-scale irrigation networks.
“The Chinese government is making increased crop productivity certainly one of their top goals over the next decade,” said Stuart Smyth, a professor in the department of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan.
“T hey are investing upwards of $100 billion into agricultural biotechnology, in order to address things like yield increases, better drought tolerance and better disease resistance,” he said.
Mussell says China has already made “impressive progress” through agricultural research and modernization efforts. “It’s an overarching priority for them,” he said.
However, sources noted that Beijing’s focus on self-sufficiency does not necessarily mean China will stop importing foreign food products altogether.
Chris Davison, president and CEO of the Canola Council of Canada, says China’s growing middle class and changing diets will likely continue driving demand — both for imported vegetable oils and feed products rendered from the oil-making process.
“Canadian canola has a well-established and recognized brand,” said Davison. He points out that while China also has a significant domestic canola industry of its own, the crop produced by Chinese farmers is “not identical” to the Canadian product.
In a follow-up email, Smyth suggested that Canada may be best able to maintain export dominance in areas where China cannot “reverse engineer” what Canada produces domestically.
“I’m sure China would like to develop these [canola] varieties, but it may be that this canola is processed here and then exported, which would limit the ability for China to reverse engineer it,” he said.
Structured around exports
While China may view food imports as a long-term vulnerability, it nevertheless uses these imports as short-term leverage.
This was highlighted in a recent trade dispute over canola exports.
In March 2025, China imposed 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian canola oil and meal in retaliation for Canada imposing 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. Months later, Beijing escalated the dispute by adding a 76 per cent tariff on Canadian canola seed itself.
The Carney government ultimately responded by striking a deal in January to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada at reduced tariffs in exchange for China reducing its tariff on Canadian canola seed from about 85 per cent to 15 per cent.
According to Greg Ip, a Canadian-American journalist who is chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal, this is a familiar playbook.
“China routinely retaliates against unfriendly governments by weaponizing its market — that is, shutting out their exports,” Ip recently wrote.
Smyth agrees.
“[China has] a history, over the past certainly five years, of any time that they feel there’s a political irritation between the two countries, that their policy response is to put a tariff on something that we export a significant percentage [of],” he said.
“Everything we export to China is vulnerable to tariffs,” he added.
Despite this, the Carney government has made it a priority to increase all Canadian exports to China by 50 per cent by 2030 as part of a renewed “strategic partnership” with Beijing.
“As a major food producer, Canada is well-positioned to remain a reliable supplier of safe and high-quality food products for Chinese consumers while helping China meet its food demands,” a spokesperson for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada told Canadian Affairs in an email statement.
At the same time, the department said Ottawa is also supporting efforts to diversify Canadian exports into other Indo-Pacific markets through trade agreements and an agricultural trade office located in the Philippines.
Mussell, likewise, points to India, Indonesia and other rapidly growing Asian economies as promising areas for export growth.
“ Is Canada going to flood the world? No, we aren’t, [but] we’ve got far more than what we can consume ourselves.”
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