Where Does Algeria Import Its Grain From? Argentina's $1.17B Cereal Corridor to North Africa — and How It Settles

Argentina is one of the largest grain suppliers to Algeria, exporting roughly $1.17 billion to Algeria in 2025, the majority of it cereals, and about $521 million to Egypt the same year, again concentrated in grain. That much the trade data shows. What the trade data never explains is the harder half: this is a dual-stress corridor — a cereal exporter only just emerging from years of its own foreign-exchange controls, selling staple calories into two of the most dollar-short import programs on the planet. As of June 2026, the commodity desks own the tonnage and none of them own the payment. This page does both. 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.

Where does Algeria import its grain from?

Algeria sources its grain primarily from Argentina, France, Brazil, Ukraine and Russia, with Argentina one of its single largest suppliers of cereals. Argentina's total exports to Algeria reached roughly $1.17 billion in 2025, the bulk of it cereals (about $605 million), per Trading Economics' Comtrade-based series. Pin the year when you cite it, because the cereal share moves with each harvest and each Algerian tender — and corridor totals swing year to year with tender timing rather than holding a steady trend.

Algeria is structurally short of the calories it eats. It is on course to import a record five million tonnes of corn in the 2024/25 marketing year, which makes it the world's ninth-largest corn importer and the second-largest on the African continent after Egypt, per Milling MEA, citing USDA data. Argentina and Brazil together have supplied roughly 87% of Algeria's corn over the past five years, with Argentina holding the lead. That dependence is the demand side of the corridor; the dollar to pay for it is the constraint.

How much grain does Argentina export to Egypt?

Argentina exported roughly $521 million to Egypt in 2025, with cereals making up about 70% of that flow — Argentina is a core wheat and corn source for Egypt's state-led import program, alongside Russia, Ukraine, France and Romania. Egypt is one of the world's largest wheat importers, and its General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) runs a near-continuous tender program precisely because domestic production cannot cover demand.

The Egyptian leg matters because Egypt is the corridor's most acute settlement case. At the height of its 2022–23 dollar crunch, Egypt's letter-of-credit import regime left roughly $9.5 billion of goods stranded at port while importers waited on dollars, per the Maritime Executive. Egypt has since secured a larger IMF program and let the pound devalue sharply through 2024, but the binding question for a grain supplier is unchanged: can the buyer convert local currency into dollars on a shipping timeline?

Does Argentina export grain — and what are its top exports?

Yes. Grains and oilseeds are the backbone of Argentina's export economy. Soybean products, corn and wheat dominate its top exports, and the agro-industrial complex is the country's single largest source of foreign currency. North Africa is a primary destination for the cereal share specifically — Algeria and Egypt are repeat buyers of Argentine corn and wheat, sitting alongside Vietnam, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China in the rotation of large structural importers.

For Argentina, that export concentration is not just commercial — it is macroeconomic. The country has spent years rationing dollars and is rebuilding central-bank reserves, which makes clean, fast, dollar-denominated payment from its grain customers a national priority, not just an exporter's preference. That is the second half of the dual-stress frame, and it is where this corridor is genuinely different from a Brazil-only grain story.

Who supplies Algeria's corn — Argentina or Brazil?

Both, and the split is close enough that it is worth stating precisely. Algeria's corn imports run on the order of $1.02 billion, led by Argentina at about $583 million ahead of Brazil at about $425 million (2024), per the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC). In tonnage terms, USDA data shows Argentina holding its lead — close to three million tonnes in the latest season — while Brazil's share has grown sharply from just over 500,000 tonnes in 2021/22 to more than two million tonnes by 2023/24.

The two LatAm suppliers are not really competing for a fixed pie; Algeria's total corn demand is climbing, so both are growing into it. We cover the Brazilian half of this North African flow — Brazil's sugar and corn into Egypt and Algeria — on the dedicated Brazil sugar and corn exports to North Africa cluster. This page keeps to Argentina and the grain leg, so the two do not double-count.

Argentina grain exports to North Africa — the country-pair table

The table below shows the corridor's largest pairs. Values are export figures from Argentina except where the row is labeled as an Algerian import. Years are labeled per row because the headline 2025 totals and the 2024 corn-supplier split should not be read as the same year. The Brazil row is included only to size Argentina's lead in Algeria's corn bill; it is covered in full on the Brazil corn cluster.

Sources: Argentina export totals from Trading Economics / Comtrade; Argentina–Egypt and the corn-supplier split compiled from OEC and our inbound-corridor research. Treat the 2025 totals as full-year Comtrade releases and refresh against 2025/26 tender data each quarter.

Isn't Argentina itself an FX-controlled exporter?

It was — and this is where the corridor's "dual-control" reputation needs an honest update. For six years Argentina ran the cepo cambiario, a tight capital-and-exchange-control regime that capped dollar purchases and forced exporters through blended official rates. On 14 April 2025 the government lifted most of those controls — letting individuals and businesses buy dollars without restriction and scrapping the mandatory 30-day wait on import payments — moving to a managed floating regime under a $20 billion IMF program, per the U.S. International Trade Administration. So the accurate framing today is not "two FX-locked countries," but a grain supplier emerging from exchange controls and rebuilding reserves, still selling into importers whose controls have not eased.

That distinction sharpens rather than softens the settlement problem. A reserve-rebuilding exporter has every incentive to be paid cleanly and fast in dollars; the friction now sits almost entirely on the African import leg, where the buyer must still source scarce foreign currency. The supply is reliable and the seller wants to be paid — the chokepoint is the dollar in Algiers and Cairo, not the grain in Rosario.

How do Algeria and Egypt pay for imported grain? The dollar problem

In U.S. dollars, routed through tight foreign-exchange-allocation and import-licensing regimes — and that is the binding constraint behind grain-tender delays, not the availability of the grain itself. The mechanism is an FX backlog: the queue of import payments waiting for a central bank or commercial bank to release scarce foreign currency, during which a confirmed cargo can sit while the supplier goes unpaid. North Africa's two big cereal buyers both run versions of it — Algeria through state import licensing and tight currency allocation, Egypt through its letter-of-credit and tender machinery.

The cost of moving those dollars, once allocated, compounds the wait. Correspondent-bank settlement into Africa runs three to five business days, sometimes up to seven, on a network that is shrinking: the number of active USD correspondent links is down 25.1% since 2011, per the Financial Stability Board's 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. Only 24.7% of Sub-Saharan beneficiary-leg payments clear within an hour — joint-slowest in the world, per the FSB's 2024 cross-border payments KPIs. Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly is the world's costliest region to move money, at 8.4% to 8.78% to send $200 against a 6.49% global average, per the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q2 2024. The grain ships; whether the dollars move on a trade timeline is a separate, harder question — the same settlement-layer failure mapped across FX-stressed markets in our pillar on why USD is scarce in Africa.

How can grain exporters settle faster across these controls?

Grain tenders are deadline-bound calories — a cargo of milling wheat or feed corn books against a delivery window, and the payment cannot drift while the central bank releases foreign currency. That is exactly where Treasury-backed stablecoins fit: 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. Because the peg does not float, they function as a settlement rail rather than a position — the dollar leg moves on the harvest's timeline, not the queue's.

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 Algerian feed importer or an Egyptian flour mill paying an Argentine grain house, the appeal is concrete: settlement in 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 against existing liquidity rather than waiting in an allocation queue. The mechanism is unpacked in how stablecoins solve dollar shortages in Africa, the rail-by-rail comparison in stablecoin settlement versus SWIFT, and the LatAm-specific playbook in how LatAm exporters get paid in dollar-short Africa.

This is not advice to evade foreign-exchange, import-licensing or anti-money-laundering controls, and it is not financial or legal advice. The credible model runs inside the regulated framework, through licensed dealers and a full audit trail. It is simply where the corridor is heading: a dollar trade that no longer has to wait on a thinning dollar rail.

Part of

This analysis is part of our Brazil and LATAM–Africa trade corridor pillar, which maps the full commodity flow from South America into Africa and the dollar bottleneck behind it. See the sibling clusters on Brazil sugar and corn exports to North Africa — which covers the Brazilian half of Algeria's corn bill — and how LatAm exporters get paid in dollar-short Africa, the settlement playbook every cluster on this hub points to. For the largest inbound corridor running on the same broken rail, see China–Africa trade in 2025.

How Artoh settles this grain corridor out of the dollar bottleneck

The structural calorie deficit that makes Algeria and Egypt import millions of tonnes of grain will not close for years. The settlement layer — the part that decides whether a buyer with local currency can pay an Argentine grain house this week — can be fixed now. That is the layer Artoh is built for.

Artoh provides USD liquidity and Treasury-backed stablecoin settlement for businesses trading into Africa and Latin America. For an importer paying Argentine corn or wheat suppliers — or for the grain houses waiting on payment from North African buyers — that means accessing dollars and settling in minutes rather than days on a correspondent chain or weeks in an allocation queue, with the dollar leg clearing offshore and a compliant audit trail, inside existing exchange-control rules. It does not remove the macro shortage; it removes the wait.

If you have grain payables aging against Argentine suppliers — in Algeria, Egypt 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 hub points to.
• Stablecoin settlement for businesses in Egypt — reference: the corridor's largest single grain market, country by country.