Brazil's Sugar and Corn Exports to North Africa: Egypt's $3.9B Year, Algeria's $872M Sugar Bill, and the Dollar Behind It

Brazil is the world's largest sugar exporter, and in 2024 it sold $872 million of sugar to Algeria and pushed corn exports to Egypt up about 174% to $1.103 billion — enough to make Egypt the single largest buyer of Brazilian corn on the planet, per the Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ANBA). Across all goods, Egypt was Brazil's largest African market at $3.9 billion in 2024, up 72% year on year, per Comtrade figures compiled in our corridor research. This is a cheap-calorie corridor: two food-import-dependent economies buying the lowest-cost large-volume supplier they can find.

The harder story is the one the trade data never tells. Both buyers — Egypt and Algeria — are precisely the foreign-exchange-stressed economies where settling in U.S. dollars, not growing the grain, is the binding constraint. Egypt's 2022 letter-of-credit mandate once stranded an estimated $9.5 billion of goods at port for roughly a year; Algeria rations imports through tight licensing. This page does two things the commodity desks skip: it states the corn-and-sugar corridor by commodity, figure, and year, each number dated and sourced; and it answers how a Brazilian exporter actually gets paid when the buyer's banking system is short of dollars. None of this is financial or legal advice — it describes how the payment rails work, not how to evade exchange-control or AML rules.

Last updated: June 2026. Figures are dated and sourced inline; we re-stamp each number quarterly.

How big are Brazil's sugar exports — and how much goes to Algeria?

Brazil is the world's largest sugar exporter, and Algeria is one of its biggest single buyers: Algeria imported $872 million of Brazilian sugar in 2024, part of a $2.5 billion all-goods flow from Brazil that year, per Comtrade and ANBA figures compiled in our corridor research. Sugar is the lead commodity in the Algeria corridor, ahead of cereals and meat — and it is the same story one market over in West Africa.

Sugar also tops Brazil's exports to Nigeria. Of roughly $880 million in Brazilian agricultural exports to Nigeria in 2024, sugar accounted for about $669 million — the dominant line, ahead of fuels and oilseeds. So the pattern that defines this corridor is consistent: Brazil supplies the cheapest large-volume raw sugar, and North and West African economies that cannot grow enough of their own buy it at scale.

The reason "brazil sugar exports" is worth pinning to a number is that the flows are large and concentrated. A handful of FX-constrained markets — Algeria and Nigeria among them — buy a disproportionate share, and each is a market where the dollar leg of the payment is the part that breaks, not the supply.

How much corn does Brazil export to Egypt?

Brazil's corn exports to Egypt surged about 174% to $1.103 billion in 2024, making Egypt the single largest buyer of Brazilian corn in the world, per ANBA. Egypt is a structural grain importer — it cannot grow enough corn and wheat to feed its population and livestock sector — and Brazil is the lowest-cost large-volume supplier able to fill that gap.

This is the flow that reframes the corridor. The dominant "Brazil–Africa in decline" narrative anchors on the 2012–13 political-era peak, but the corn-to-Egypt leg more than doubled in a single year and pushed Egypt to the top of Brazil's African export table. Note the year carefully: this is a 2024 figure. On Trading Economics' Comtrade series, Brazil's total exports to Egypt eased to roughly $3.73 billion in 2025, so the corridor is flat-to-slightly-down on that pair rather than still climbing — cite the year when you quote it.

How much does Brazil export to Egypt overall?

$3.9 billion in 2024, up 72% year on year — making Egypt Brazil's largest African market by a clear margin, per Comtrade figures via ANBA in our corridor research. Corn led the surge at $1.103 billion, with sugar, soybeans and beef filling out the rest of the basket.

That $3.9 billion concentrates a year of food trade into one of the continent's most foreign-exchange-constrained economies. The next year softened — roughly $3.73 billion in 2025 on Trading Economics' series — so the corridor is best read as record-high-then-flat, not a continuous climb. Either way, the volume is large and the settlement currency is the same: dollars Egypt has spent the last three years rationing.

Why do Egypt and Algeria buy so much Brazilian grain and sugar?

Price and scale. Brazil is the cheapest large-volume supplier of corn and sugar on the global market, and both Egypt and Algeria import staple calories they cannot produce in sufficient quantity at home. Egypt feeds a population of well over 100 million and a sizeable poultry and livestock sector that runs on imported feed corn; Algeria's domestic sugar and cereal output falls far short of demand. When a buyer must import food at scale, the deciding factors are landed cost and volume reliability — and on both, Brazil wins.

That commercial logic is exactly what makes the settlement problem so acute. These are not discretionary purchases a buyer can defer when dollars are tight — they are staple-calorie imports that have to keep flowing. So when the dollar leg of the payment seizes up, the strain lands on must-have food trade, which is why the chokepoint shows up as goods stranded at port rather than orders quietly cancelled.

Brazil corn and sugar to North Africa — the volume table

The table below shows the corn and sugar corridor by pair and commodity. All figures are export values from Brazil; the year is labeled on every row because the totals and the commodity lines come from different releases and should not be read as a single moment. Algeria's corn is split out separately — Argentina, not Brazil, is the larger corn supplier to Algeria, a point we cover on the Argentina grain cluster so the two pages do not re-argue the same Algeria fact.

Sources: 2024 corn and Egypt-total figures from ANBA; Algeria, Nigeria and aggregate 2024 values compiled from Comtrade in our corridor research; the 2025 Egypt total from Trading Economics.

Why is paying for these imports so hard? The dollar problem

Because Egypt and Algeria are invoiced in dollars they have to ration, and the machinery they use to ration them strands goods before it strands orders. The clearest case is Egypt's letter of credit — a bank guarantee that the seller will be paid once shipping documents are presented. In February 2022, Egypt mandated letters of credit for most imports as a way to control which transactions got scarce dollars. The effect was a wall: an estimated $9.5 billion of goods stranded at Egyptian ports for roughly a year, per the Maritime Executive.

Egypt has since moved — it secured an $8 billion IMF Extended Fund Facility and let the pound devalue roughly 40% in March 2024 to begin clearing the backlog — but the underlying scarcity has not vanished, and importers still queue for dollars to settle food invoices. The same Egyptian LC mechanism throttles Asian trade too; we walk through its bank-by-bank workings in Egypt's letter-of-credit problem on the China corridor. Algeria runs a parallel constraint through tight import licensing rather than an LC mandate, with the same result: a permitted, priced deal can still wait on foreign-currency allocation.

The friction is measurable across the region. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world's most expensive place to move money — 8.4% to 8.78% to send $200, against a 6.49% global average, per the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q2 2024 — and the dollar rail itself is thinning: the number of active USD correspondent links is down 25.1% since 2011 worldwide — with North Africa among the hardest-hit regions, down as much as 40.6% — per the Financial Stability Board's correspondent-banking data, and the retreat has continued, with Barclays, Standard Chartered, Société Générale and BNP Paribas all exiting or divesting African operations between 2022 and 2025. Correspondent settlement runs three to five business days, sometimes up to seven, and only 24.7% of Sub-Saharan beneficiary-leg payments clear within an hour, per the FSB's 2024 KPIs. The harvest is rarely the problem. The payment is. The same settlement-layer failure, mapped across FX-constrained markets, sits in our analysis of why USD is scarce in Africa.

How are these commodity flows being settled faster?

For a staple-food buyer in Cairo, the binding number is import-cover — how many weeks of reserves stand behind the next sugar or corn cargo — and every day a payment waits in an LC queue is a day that cover is spoken for. Treasury-backed stablecoins shorten that wait: digital dollars that hold a 1:1 peg to the U.S. dollar, backed by short-dated U.S. Treasuries and cash held with regulated custodians. The peg holds, so the instrument behaves like a payment rail rather than a speculative asset — the dollar leg clears against existing liquidity instead of drawing down scarce reserves at the worst moment.

The scale is no longer marginal. Business-to-business stablecoin payments reached $226 billion in 2025, up 733% year on year, per McKinsey, drawing on Artemis data, December 2025. For an Egyptian feed-corn buyer or an Algerian sugar importer, the appeal is concrete: settlement in seconds or minutes instead of days, at a fraction of correspondent-banking cost — industry estimates put the saving as high as 90% on some corridors — with the dollar leg clearing offshore rather than waiting in an LC queue or a licensing backlog. The mechanism is unpacked in how stablecoins solve dollar shortages in Africa, and the rail-by-rail comparison in stablecoin settlement versus SWIFT.

This is not advice to bypass foreign-exchange or anti-money-laundering controls. The credible model runs inside the regulated framework — through licensed dealers, with a full audit trail. It simply removes the wait from a dollar trade that no longer has to sit on a thinning dollar rail.

Where this sits in the corridor

This is the corn-and-sugar leg of a much larger Brazil–Africa story. Two sibling pages divide the rest of the North African grain corridor with this one — and the settlement mechanism is shared across all of them:

• Argentina grain exports to Algeria and Egypt — the $1.17 billion Argentine cereal corridor into the same two buyers, where Argentina is the larger corn supplier to Algeria and itself an FX-controlled exporter selling into dollar-short markets.
• Brazil chicken exports to Africa — the 965,699-tonne poultry corridor, the other half of Brazil's food trade into the continent, with South Africa as the largest single buyer.
• How LatAm exporters get paid in dollar-short Africa — the full settlement playbook every commodity cluster points to: why BRICS does not put this trade on local-currency rails, why PAPSS does not reach a São Paulo exporter, and what does.

Part of

This analysis is part of our pillar on the Brazil–Africa trade corridor — the record-high commodity flow that still settles in dollars Africa is short of. For the sibling corridor running into Africa from Asia, see our hub on India–Africa trade.

When the dollars don't move: how Artoh helps

Egypt and Algeria's structural food-import dependence will not change — and neither will their need for dollars to pay for it. What can change now is the settlement layer: whether an importer holding local currency can actually pay a Brazilian sugar or corn supplier this week, rather than waiting on a letter-of-credit queue or an FX-allocation backlog.

Artoh provides USD liquidity and Treasury-backed stablecoin settlement for businesses trading into Africa and Latin America. For a North African buyer importing corn, sugar, soy or beef from Brazil, that means accessing dollars and settling supplier payments in minutes rather than days on a correspondent chain — with the dollar leg clearing offshore, a compliant audit trail, and inside existing exchange-control rules. It does not close the macro dollar shortage. It removes the wait.

If you have payables aging against Brazilian suppliers — in Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria or elsewhere in the corridor — and the dollars are not moving, let's talk.

Further reading

• How LatAm exporters get paid in dollar-short Africa — the settlement playbook that every commodity cluster on this corridor points to.
• Stablecoin settlement for businesses in Egypt — reference: the corridor's largest single market, country by country.