China Has a Food Security Plan. Does Canada?

Beijing is restructuring its food supply to reduce dependence on countries like Canada. Ottawa’s response is to sell them more. That tension has a cost, and Canadians are going to feel it.

I don’t usually lead with trade policy. But this one landed differently. China’s new Five-Year Plan crossed my desk a few weeks ago and I kept coming back to a single question: if Beijing is investing billions to need us less, why is Ottawa’s answer to sell them more? That question pulled on a thread I’ve been watching for a while, one about what Canada actually does with what it grows, and what we’re quietly giving away in the process. This dispatch is where that thread leads.

It is May 2026, and newsrooms across Canada are still working through the implications of a document released in Beijing two months ago.

China has a plan. It always does.

Released in March, China’s new food security plan— Beijing’s 15th Five-Year Plan — identifies food security as a strategic national priority, placing it alongside Taiwan and technology development as one of the country’s defining challenges for 2026 to 2030.

The plan calls for investment in domestic seed technology, expanded irrigation infrastructure, and large-scale agricultural biotechnology. According to Stuart Smyth, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan, China is putting upwards of $100 billion into biotech alone, targeting yield increases, drought tolerance, and disease resistance.

The goal is unambiguous: reduce China’s dependence on imported food.

For Canadian farmers, that goal deserves careful attention. For the rest of us, it should too.

The Exposure Is Real

Canada sells roughly $200 billion worth of agricultural products each year. About $10 billion of that goes to China, making it Canada’s second-largest agricultural export market after the United States. The products moving through that relationship, canola, soybeans, pork, seafood, pulse crops, are not marginal. They represent a structural dependency baked into how Canada’s agricultural sector is built.

“We have capacity in our agriculture and food system built around export of these products,” Al Mussell, senior research fellow at the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, told Canadian Affairs. “If we get denied export to certain countries, that can hurt us very badly because we’re leveraged to serve those customers.”

That leverage runs in both directions, and China knows it.

Beijing has a documented pattern of converting food imports into political tools. When Canada imposed 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles in 2024, China responded with 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian canola oil and meal, then escalated by adding a 76 per cent tariff on canola seed itself. The Carney government eventually negotiated a partial resolution, allowing 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada at reduced tariffs in exchange for China reducing its canola seed tariff from roughly 85 per cent to 15 per cent.

Smyth puts it plainly: “Everything we export to China is vulnerable to tariffs.”

That pattern is not incidental. It is policy. And if China succeeds in reducing its import dependency over the next decade, the leverage it currently holds over Canadian exporters does not disappear. It just becomes cheaper to use.

Self-Sufficiency as a Long Game

China’s food imports grew from $10.3 billion to over $200 billion in the two decades after its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization. That growth fuelled Canadian agricultural expansion. The Five-Year Plan signals that Beijing views the trajectory as a strategic liability, not an achievement.

The country has limited arable land and water relative to its population of 1.4 billion. It is largely self-sufficient in wheat, rice, and corn. But it remains heavily reliant on imports for soybeans, canola, and protein, which is precisely where Canadian exports are concentrated.

Mussell says China has already made “impressive progress” through agricultural modernization. The Five-Year Plan accelerates that work with institutional backing and public investment at a scale most countries cannot match.

This does not mean Canadian exports disappear overnight. Chris Davison, president and CEO of the Canola Council of Canada, points out that Canada’s canola has a distinct profile that Chinese domestic production does not fully replicate. Smyth notes that processing canola in Canada before export, rather than shipping seed, could limit China’s ability to reverse-engineer Canadian varieties and reduce its dependence on them.

But these are partial buffers, not structural solutions. A country that has demonstrated willingness to weaponize tariffs in response to political irritation, and that is actively investing to need fewer Canadian products, is not a stable foundation for a sector built around export volume.

Ottawa’s Answer, and Its Limits

The Carney government has set a target of increasing all Canadian exports to China by 50 per cent by 2030, framed as part of a renewed strategic partnership with Beijing. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada told Canadian Affairs that Canada is “well-positioned to remain a reliable supplier of safe and high-quality food products for Chinese consumers.”

Read that again slowly.

Canada’s official response to a country that is actively investing to need fewer imports, and that has repeatedly used food tariffs as a geopolitical weapon, is to deepen the relationship and sell more into it. The 50 per cent target is not a diversification strategy. It is a concentration strategy dressed in optimistic language.

Ottawa is also pursuing Indo-Pacific diversification, including an agricultural trade office in the Philippines and engagement with India and Indonesia. These are real efforts. They are also years from meaningful scale, and they are being built in parallel with, not instead of, a growing dependency on the market most likely to weaponize that dependency.

The canola tariff dispute offered a preview of how this plays out. Canada negotiated its way to a partial resolution by offering China access to discounted electric vehicles. The agricultural sector got relief. Canada got a lesson in how quickly its export leverage can be turned against it. What changed structurally as a result? Very little.

Positioning Canada as a reliable supplier to a country working methodically to need fewer reliable suppliers is not a strategy. It is a hope. And hope is not a plan.

The Gap We Are Not Talking About

There is a quieter story running beneath the tariff disputes and export targets, one that China’s Five-Year Plan throws into sharper relief.

China is investing to close its production gaps. Canada has production. What Canada lacks is the processing infrastructure to convert that production into finished food products at scale: flour milled domestically, canola oil refined and bottled here, pulse crops turned into packaged protein, grains processed into pasta and preserved goods.

We grow it. We ship it raw. Someone else adds the value.

The gap shows up in two places most Canadians never connect. It shows up in GDP, where the value added by milling, refining, processing, and packaging accrues to other countries rather than to Canadian workers and Canadian communities. And it shows up on the shelf, where the finished products made from Canadian raw materials come back to us as imports, priced accordingly. We grow the canola. Someone else makes the oil. We grow the wheat. Someone else makes the pasta. The margin between what we export and what we pay to import it back is a transfer of economic value that happens so quietly most people never notice it is occurring.

Canada’s food security conversation tends to focus on what we produce. The less comfortable question is what we can actually do with it when the export door closes. Building out domestic processing capacity does not eliminate the risks that come with China’s long game. But it begins to cushion them, and it starts to answer a question we have been deferring for a long time.

The solution is not to export less. It is to export smarter, and to stop leaving half the value on the table. Building domestic processing capacity is a win on every front. It strengthens food security for Canadians at home. It creates higher-value export products that are harder to undercut with tariffs and harder for competitors to reverse-engineer. And it keeps the economic return from Canadian agriculture, the jobs, the margins, the tax base, in Canada rather than in the countries that buy our raw materials and sell us back the finished goods. Growing our exports is a worthy goal. But exports of raw commodities without a processing strategy is not a food policy. It is an incomplete one. China is investing billions to close its production gaps. Canada could close its processing gap for a fraction of that cost, and the return would show up both in GDP and on the grocery shelf.

China has a plan. The question is whether Canada does.

Sources: Canadian Affairs, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, Canola Council of Canada, University of Saskatchewan Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

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About the Author

Leni Spooner is a Canadian writer, researcher, and civic storyteller, and the founder of Between the Lines Canada. Her work blends historical context with present-day analysis to help readers see the deeper patterns shaping national decisions. Between the Lines Canada explores Canadian politics, policy, and public life through accessible, story-driven analysis. Readout: Canada is its newsletter dispatch.

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