Canada-China Agrifood Reset: What Is Actually Fresh?

I’ve had a chance to think about the Canada–China Summit this past January, which included widely reported agrifood announcements being described as a new dawn or more cautiously, a thawing of what has been a very frosty relationship. I thought it would be worthwhile to think about what is a re-commitment or re-packaged old news, and what we can actually take away from what China and Canada have said since the Summit.

Earlier this year, the governments of Canada and China made announcements framed as being fresh outcomes from a summit between the countries’ leaders, which included specific references to agri-business and agrifood cooperation. The language most frequently quoted appears in documents released after the summit, the Canada-China Economic and Trade Cooperation Roadmap and the accompanying Joint Statement. A subsequent Government of Canada backgrounder, updated last week, added more operational detail by setting out what Canada expects to happen next on tariffs and market access.

At a high level, the Roadmap’s agrifood section is a commitment to re-open regulatory systems: the parties welcomed the renewal of the CFIA-GACC food safety/animal and plant health cooperation MOU, committed to further technical discussions (including zoning arrangements), and committed to coordinating the revitalization of the Canada–China Joint Agriculture Committee. Those are worth something, but they’re not a sea change either.

Canada had already signalled an intention to renew the CFIA-GACC MOU and increase technical collaboration in 2025. So, not new. What is new is that Canada and China decided to elevate these conversations and press releases to the leader level and tie them to market access issues.

The new-new development is a product-specific instrument: both sides list an arrangement between GACC and CFIA establishing a Protocol for the Quarantine and Hygiene Requirements for Pet Food to be exported to China. Protocols of this kind set market access conditions under which exports can occur (on eligible facilities, documentation, inspection, and hygiene controls, e.g.).

The other new development with near-term relevance is a statement from the government of Canada last week, which states it expects, among other things, that certain tariffs characterized as anti-discriminatory measures will not apply to certain products from March 1, 2026 through year-end, and that China will accelerate resumption of exports for products including beef and pet food. These appear to be expectations, not guarantees. But Canada setting expectations for Chinese market policies to its domestic industries is certainly new and something we haven’t seen in a long time in Canada, which is itself an important signal.

Often, after political summits, countries will issue separate sets of press releases or roadmaps that emphasize very different things. That is the case here, certainly.

Canada’s Roadmap language is framed around resolving market access issues through technical cooperation, and it goes out of its way to flag zoning arrangements, which implies the possibility of maintaining trade from unaffected regions during animal disease or plant health events. China’s public readout, by contrast, foregrounds food security and, notably, presents the pet food protocol as one of the signed deliverables, alongside the broader food safety/animal and plant health MOU.

So, Canada seems to be selling a pragmatic, exporter-facing package that promises to restore predictable pathways and China is selling a package that points to international cooperation in a sector closely tied to domestic political priorities.

For Canadian entities looking at the Chinese market, the near-term takeaway is that we’re seeing relationship repair. And this is correctly being reported in industry-specific and mainstream media sources.

On pet food in particular, global brands with Canadian manufacturing footprints should treat the signed protocol as a prompt to start internal readiness work: mapping product composition and sourcing, validating hygiene and traceability controls, and preparing for the likely administrative steps that will inevitably come with Chinese market access.

More broadly, exporters should read the February 17 backgrounder as an indication of where Ottawa expects movement first (it appears canola and certain seafood lines are first, then a push to restart flows in beef and pet food), while still building contracts and supply plans. But, keep in mind: this is all based on expectations at this point.

For international companies using China as a manufacturing or ingredient-sourcing base for the Canadian market, it’s hard to see a similarly open path forward. The same package that promotes open channels and technical cooperation also identifies a shift toward managed, politically visible trade tools like quotas or targeted remissions, pointing to a rules-heavy environment, where compliance, origin and traceability documentation, are likely to be scrutinized. So, some tepid opportunity.

Finally, the reception of these announcements cannot be separated from the last decade of volatility between Canada and China. In remarks circulating today, former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland argued Canada should be “skeptical” of Chinese commitments and expressed concern about any narrative that Beijing is more trustworthy than Washington. Her comments echo an earlier theme she has voiced publicly: that a world in which countries increasingly rely on China is not a neutral shift, because it implicates values and the predictability of commitments.