India's West-Africa Rice Belt: Who Feeds Togo, Benin and Côte d'Ivoire — and How They Pay

Last updated: June 2026.

West Africa imports most of its rice from India — Togo has sourced up to 88% of its imported rice from India in a single year, and Benin, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire together make the region the world's largest buyer of Indian non-basmati rice. It is a food-security corridor: local harvests cover only a fraction of demand, the gap is filled by a single dominant supplier, and every sack is invoiced in U.S. dollars that West African importers struggle to source. Here is the part nobody frames as a settlement problem: India is the pharmacy and the granary of the region, yet it has no rupee settlement rail into West Africa — none of these countries holds a Special Rupee Vostro account, so even India's own currency cannot clear the trade, and the dollar becomes the only option in the world's costliest, slowest payment region. This page maps the country-pair trade data, explains what happened when India banned rice exports in 2023, and shows why a thin-margin staple still clears on slow, scarce dollar rails. None of this is financial or legal advice; it describes how the rails work, not how to evade exchange-control or AML rules.

Where does West Africa import its rice from?

Overwhelmingly from India. Togo has sourced up to 88% of its imported rice from India — in 2021 it bought 201,363 tonnes from India, 88% of all the rice it purchased abroad that year, according to Togo First reporting on national trade data. Benin and Côte d'Ivoire are also top destinations for Indian rice, and across the bloc West Africa has been the single largest market for Indian rice exports for several years running.

The dependence is structural, not incidental. Togo's own rice output covers only about 32% of national demand, and the country ran a white-rice deficit of more than 88,600 tonnes in the 2020/2021 season, per the same Togo First report citing the agriculture ministry. When local production meets a third of what people eat, the other two-thirds has to be imported — and for West Africa, that overwhelmingly means Indian parboiled rice.

This is the part of the corridor nobody frames as a payments problem. The trade is essential, price-sensitive, and concentrated on one supplier paid in one currency the buyers do not earn enough of. That combination — staple goods, thin margins, dollar invoicing, FX scarcity — is exactly where settlement friction does the most damage.

How much rice does India send to West Africa?

Enough to make the region India's most important rice market — and to make rice one of India's largest export lines into West Africa. Benin was India's single biggest non-basmati rice destination in FY2023-24, importing about 1.28 million tonnes of Indian rice worth roughly $513 million (₹4,236 crore), at an average price near $400 a tonne, per India's official rice-export report compiled by DGCIS. Benin is less an end-market than a gateway: much of that grain is re-exported overland into Nigeria and neighbouring markets, so the Benin figure understates how widely Indian rice feeds the wider region.

India's rice trade overall is enormous and recovering fast. India exported about $12.95 billion of rice (roughly 20.1 million tonnes) in FY2024-25 — more than 40% of world rice trade — with non-basmati exports up sharply after trade restrictions eased, and Benin, Guinea, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire sitting among the top non-basmati markets, per India Brand Equity Foundation citing commerce-ministry data. For Togo specifically, rice is a leading import line within a much larger fuel-dominated trade relationship, which is where the country-pair numbers come in.

A note on what we are not claiming. The high-volume search term rice export india is a commercial, exporter-directory query (about 3,600 searches a month, per DataForSEO, June 2026) — this page is not an export how-to. The point here is the settlement half of the corridor that the directories ignore: the rice moves; the question is how the dollars to pay for it move.

India–West Africa trade, by the numbers

The table below states each figure with its direction, year and source. Several of these blend fiscal years and reporting bodies — Indian Ministry of External Affairs and embassy data, India's DGCIS customs statistics, and Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity — so treat the dollar splits as best-available estimates and read the direction and year on every line.

Two caveats for anyone re-using these numbers. First, the Togo rice and petroleum splits ($327M and nearly $3B) are 2023 Harvard Atlas figures sitting under a 2025 headline total of $3.48B — they describe the shape of the relationship (fuel dominant, rice the leading food line), not a single clean year. Second, the Côte d'Ivoire total carries a genuine spread: TradingEconomics shows about $1.41B for calendar 2024 ($892M India exports, $521M imports), while the brief's MEA-sourced figure is $1.54B for FY2024-25 — both are defensible for their respective periods, so we state both rather than blur them.

What happened when India banned non-basmati rice exports?

The corridor's single-supplier fragility became a live supply-and-price shock. India banned exports of non-basmati white rice on 20 July 2023 to protect domestic supply, a move USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service documented at the time. For a region sourcing the majority of its staple from one country, a supplier-side switch flipped overnight from a trade statistic into a food-security problem — Togo First reported the country was "bracing for impact" as the restriction hit.

The ban held for over a year before India reversed it. On 28 September 2024 the government moved non-basmati white rice from "prohibited" back to "free," initially with a $490-per-tonne minimum export price that it then removed in October 2024, according to Business Standard reporting on the DGFT notification. West African prices, which had climbed during the restriction, eased once Indian supply returned. The episode is the clearest evidence of the corridor's exposure: when one supplier controls the majority of a region's staple, that supplier's domestic policy becomes the region's food-price policy.

The payments lesson is quieter but just as important. During the ban, importers who could secure scarce alternative supply still had to pay for it in dollars, faster, at higher prices — concentrating exactly the FX pressure the corridor is least equipped to absorb. Supply risk and settlement risk are not separate problems on a staple-food line; they compound.

Why is rice a dollar problem for West Africa?

Because rice is invoiced in U.S. dollars, and West African importers sit in the world's hardest region to source and move them — with no rupee alternative to fall back on. Unlike Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda, none of the West-African rice destinations holds a Special Rupee Vostro account, the bank-to-bank arrangement that lets a handful of countries settle India trade directly in rupees; for Togo, Benin and Côte d'Ivoire, the dollar is not the preferred rail, it is the only rail. Sub-Saharan Africa is the costliest region on earth to send money — 8.4% to 8.78% to send $200, and 13.4% through banks, against a 3% G20 target, per the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide report. Those headline figures are for remittances, but they signal the same underlying scarcity and friction that price-sensitive trade payments run into.

The trade-payment plumbing is just as slow. Only 24.7% of Sub-Saharan African payments clear within one hour — the joint-slowest globally — and every Sub-Saharan B2B and P2P use case costs more than 3%, according to the Financial Stability Board's 2024 cross-border payment KPIs. On a commodity as thin-margined as rice, a 3%-plus settlement cost layered on top of an FX premium is the difference between a viable import and a stranded one.

And the dollar access itself is shrinking. USD correspondent-banking relationships in Africa are down about 25.1% since 2011 as global banks keep "de-risking" out of the continent, per the Financial Stability Board's 2018 correspondent-banking data, and the retreat has continued — Barclays, Standard Chartered, Société Générale and BNP Paribas have all exited or divested African operations between 2022 and 2025. Fewer correspondent relationships means fewer, slower, costlier channels to move the dollars a rice importer needs. For the deeper structural reasons behind the scarcity, see why USD is scarce in Africa.

How do West African importers pay for Indian rice today?

Mostly through correspondent-banking dollar chains that run 3 to 5, and up to 7, business days and depend on the importer first sourcing the foreign currency. A West African buyer's bank routes the payment through a chain of intermediary banks to reach the Indian exporter's bank; each hop adds time, fees and the risk that a correspondent relationship has been cut. The structure was built for occasional high-value transfers, not for the steady, repeat, thin-margin flow of a staple-food import.

That dependency is the single point of failure. When dollars are scarce or expensive — as they routinely are across the CFA-franc zone and the wider region — the dollar bill on a rice shipment does not disappear; it just gets settled slower, or at a parallel-market premium that eats the importer's margin on a commodity sold at near-cost. The same friction we map across the India–Africa corridors shows up here in its most unforgiving form, because food traders have the least margin to absorb it. The full mechanism is covered in how stablecoins solve dollar shortages in Africa.

How can stablecoin settlement de-risk staple-food imports?

By removing the queue dependency entirely. Stablecoins — Treasury-backed digital dollars pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and backed by short-dated U.S. Treasuries and cash held in regulated custody, not speculative crypto — settle directly in minutes rather than days. For a rice importer, that means paying the Indian exporter without joining a correspondent-bank queue or paying a parallel-market premium on top of an already thin margin.

This is corporate settlement, not speculation, and the volume now reflects that. B2B stablecoin payments reached $226 billion in 2025, up 733% year-on-year, according to McKinsey's analysis with Artemis data. On a thin-margin staple like rice, the relevant number is not the macro total but the spread the rail removes: no correspondent-hop fees stacked over multiple days, and no parallel-market premium paid just to source the dollars on time. Chainalysis attributes Sub-Saharan Africa's high-value on-chain growth to cross-border trade demand of exactly this kind, per its 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa report. For the head-to-head on speed, cost and finality versus the bank path, see stablecoin settlement vs SWIFT.

It is worth being precise about what settlement rails do and do not change. They do not lower the dollar price of rice, and they do not replace a compliant bank relationship — they sit alongside it. What they remove is the multi-day, multi-hop delay and the FX-availability bottleneck, which on a staple-food line is exactly the friction that strands working capital. For more on how the dollar leg breaks across this pillar, the same dynamic plays out in India–Nigeria pharma and auto trade, in India–Egypt's letter-of-credit trap, and across India–East Africa's net-exporter corridors.

Further reading

For the country-level settlement reference on the one West-African rice destination with a live guide, see the Côte d'Ivoire stablecoin and settlement overview. (Togo and Benin country guides are not yet published; the corridor coverage for those markets lives in the cluster pages linked above.)

Part of

India–Africa Trade: The $100 Billion Corridor and Its Dollar Problem

When the dollar shortage is the bottleneck, settlement is the fix

West Africa's rice problem is not weak demand or scarce supply — Togo sources up to 88% of its imported rice from India, Benin moves more than a million tonnes of it a year, and the region is the world's largest market for Indian non-basmati. The constraint is sourcing scarce U.S. dollars to settle a dollar-priced staple before the order economics break, inside the costliest, slowest payment region on earth, where correspondent relationships are still being cut.

Artoh gives West African food importers direct access to USD liquidity and Treasury-backed stablecoin settlement — digital dollars backed 1:1 by U.S. Treasuries and cash, moved through licensed, audit-traceable channels. The exporter in India gets paid in minutes; the importer settles the dollar leg without joining the correspondent-bank queue or paying a parallel-market premium on a thin-margin commodity. It is settlement infrastructure, not speculation, and it sits alongside — not instead of — a compliant bank relationship.

If you are paying Indian rice suppliers from Togo, Benin or Côte d'Ivoire and watching the payments stall on FX availability, let's talk.