US Corn Shipments to Bangladesh Rebound as Import Market Diversifies Away From India

American corn is back on the menu for Bangladesh's poultry and fish feed mills after an eight year absence, and the numbers released this week show the comeback has real weight behind it. The United States captured 6 percent of Bangladesh's corn import market in the 2025-26 marketing year, or roughly 111,000 tonnes out of total imports of 17.4 lakh tonnes, according to trade data reported this week. It is a small slice next to Brazil's dominant 68 percent share, but for a supplier that had not sold a single tonne of corn to Bangladesh since 2018, going from zero to six percent in one marketing year is a meaningful foothold, and one with a clear political backstory.

How the Market Is Actually Divided

Brazil remains comfortably the largest source of Bangladesh's corn imports, supplying 68 percent of the total in the 2025-26 marketing year, down from the roughly 93 percent share it held just one year earlier when Argentina and Pakistan were splitting most of the rest with 4 percent and 2 percent respectively. India, once the region's default supplier thanks to cheap freight and geographic proximity, has clawed back some share to 24 percent this year after a period of decline, while Argentina and Pakistan have effectively been squeezed out by the United States' arrival. The reshuffling reflects a market that is growing quickly enough, and diversifying its supplier base fast enough, that no single country's gain has to come purely at another's expense, though India's shifting fortunes are the clearest sign that old patterns of supply are being renegotiated.

Supplier	MY2024-25 share	MY2025-26 share
Brazil	93%	68%
India	Declining	24%
United States	0%	6%
Argentina	4%	Negligible
Pakistan	2%	Negligible

Why India Lost Ground

India's retreat from the Bangladeshi corn market did not happen overnight, and it has little to do with Bangladesh itself. Since 2024, India's exportable corn surplus has fallen sharply as the country diverted more of its domestic harvest into corn based biofuel production, a policy driven by New Delhi's own energy goals rather than any change in demand from Dhaka. That left a gap that Brazil, with its vast soy and corn growing regions in Mato Grosso and Parana, was well positioned to fill, and it did so aggressively, pushing its own share above 90 percent at one point last year before this year's modest pullback to 68 percent as the market diversified further. Bangladeshi feed millers, who buy corn primarily to grind into poultry, dairy and aquaculture feed rather than for direct human consumption, have shown themselves willing to switch suppliers quickly whenever price and shipping logistics favour a new origin, which is exactly the dynamic that gave the United States its opening this year.

The Trade Politics Behind the Comeback

The US return to the Bangladeshi corn market is inseparable from the broader trade tension that defined the relationship over the past year. Washington had threatened steep tariffs on Bangladeshi exports, chiefly the ready made garments that make up the bulk of what Bangladesh sells to American buyers, as part of a push from the Trump administration to rebalance trade deficits with a long list of trading partners. Bangladesh runs a sizeable surplus with the United States built almost entirely on garment exports, and Dhaka's response, in part, was to look for ways to buy more American goods, agricultural commodities among them, in order to narrow what officials described as a $6.2 billion annual trade gap and give Washington less reason to follow through on tariff threats. Three Bangladeshi feed companies made the first move, placing an order for roughly 60,000 tonnes of American corn that arrived at Chattogram port in early January this year, a shipment that effectively reopened a supply line that had sat dormant since 2018. The tariff threats themselves were later ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court, but by then Bangladeshi buyers had already begun diversifying toward American origin corn, and that habit appears to be sticking rather than reversing now that the legal pressure has eased.

Why Bangladesh Needs So Much Imported Corn in the First Place

The scale of the underlying demand explains why there is room for multiple large suppliers to coexist in this market without any of them fully displacing the others. Bangladesh's total annual corn requirement runs above 71 lakh tonnes, driven by a poultry and dairy sector that has expanded steadily as household protein consumption rises, alongside a fast growing aquaculture industry that also depends heavily on corn based feed formulations. Domestic production covers only about 60 lakh tonnes of that need, leaving a structural shortfall of roughly 11 lakh tonnes that has to come from somewhere every single year, a gap that has widened over the past decade as demand growth has consistently outpaced the improvements in domestic yields. Imports for the coming marketing year are projected to reach 18 lakh tonnes, a 3.4 percent increase on this year's total, suggesting the shortfall is not narrowing even as local farmers respond to the economics of the crop; corn cultivation reportedly returns about three times the profit of alternative crops for many growers, which should in theory encourage more domestic planting, but has not yet been enough to meaningfully close the gap with consumption.

The corn trade is a small but telling piece of a bigger back and forth between the two countries this year. Bangladesh's garment exports to the United States, which had wobbled in the spring on fears that Western retailers would cut orders by as much as 10 percent over freight costs and diesel shortages, rebounded sharply in July and August, climbing 11.42 percent year on year to $1.61 billion for the two months combined, with August alone up more than 25 percent. That rebound matters here because it is garment sales, not corn purchases, that generate the dollars Bangladesh needs to keep buying American agricultural goods at all; a stronger RMG performance gives Dhaka more room to keep the corn trade flowing without straining its own foreign exchange position, while a renewed slump in garment orders would make continued diversification into higher priced American corn, relative to Brazilian or Indian supply, a harder sell for cost conscious feed millers.

What a Bigger US Role Would Mean

A 6 percent market share is not yet enough to call the United States a major player in Bangladesh's feed grain trade, but the direction of travel matters more than the current size. If the diplomatic logic that opened the door, easing trade tensions by buying more American agricultural goods, continues to hold, American corn has room to grow further into a market that is itself expanding by several percentage points a year. For Bangladesh, a more diversified supplier base is generally a good hedge against the kind of single country disruption that hit when India's exportable surplus dried up after 2024; leaning on Brazil, India and the United States simultaneously, rather than depending heavily on any one of them, gives feed millers more room to negotiate on price and more insulation against a bad harvest or a policy shift in any single exporting country. The next marketing year's numbers, when Bangladesh's total import requirement is expected to climb toward 18 lakh tonnes, will show whether the American toehold established this year turns into a durable share of the market or proves to be a one year story tied to a trade dispute that has since been resolved in the courts.