Soy Canada's Executive Director says they're concerned they've become too dependent on the Chinese market.

Ron Davidson's comments follow news from their exporters China's increased Canadian soybean inspections for plant-based pathogens and shipments will be held for a couple weeks.

He says a number of shipments have been redirected to other markets until they can be more certain about the current trade situation with China.

"There's no official indication of why it is happening, so we're a little uncertain at this point whether this is a new direction by the Government, or authorities at one port paying more attention to the soybeans."

Davidson explains more soybean were shipped to China because of escalating trade tensions between the United States and China.

"Normally we would ship about a third of our crop there, and in 2018 it was up to 60 per cent," he said. "We were facing extremely aggressive American low price competition everywhere but China, so we were sort of forced to redirect into China."

Davidson says in the last four months of 2018, they shipped about 3 million tonnes of Canadian soybeans to China, which drastically dropped to only 3 thousand tonnes in the first three months of 2019.

He attributes this sudden halt to the South American crop coming onto the market and nervous importers concerned about market access.

Davidson says he looks forward to a day when they can go back to trading soybeans on the basis of quality, price and service, and escape from political tensions impacting soybean trade.