How Much Chicken Does Brazil Export to Africa? The 965,699-Tonne Corridor and How It Gets Paid

Last updated: June 2026.

Brazil shipped 965,699 tonnes of chicken to Africa in 2024, up about 18% year on year — and South Africa alone took roughly a third of it. As the world's largest halal poultry exporter, Brazil is the cheapest large-scale supplier of a must-have, dollar-priced protein into some of the continent's most foreign-exchange-constrained markets. This page states the volume with its primary source, breaks down where the chicken goes, and answers the half no poultry report covers: how a São Paulo exporter actually gets paid when the importer cannot easily find the dollars the trade is priced in. None of this is financial or legal advice; it describes how the rails work, not how to evade exchange-control rules.

How much chicken does Brazil export to Africa?

Brazil exported 965,699 tonnes of chicken to Africa in 2024, an increase of about 18% over 2023, according to Brazil's poultry association ABPA (Associação Brasileira de Proteína Animal), reported by Ecofin Agency. Africa was one of the standout destinations in a record export year for Brazilian poultry, and the continent's share has been climbing as buyers chase the cheapest reliable source of frozen protein — African imports of Brazilian chicken are up roughly 74% over five years.

That single number reframes the corridor. Brazil is not a marginal supplier to Africa — it is the dominant one, moving close to a million tonnes of chicken a year into markets that, in many cases, cannot grow or chill enough protein domestically to meet demand. For context, Brazil is the world's largest exporter of chicken meat overall, shipping about 5.29 million tonnes globally in 2024, per ABPA via The Poultry Site — so Africa's near-966,000 tonnes is a large slice of the biggest poultry-export engine on the planet.

The composition matters as much as the size. This is frozen, price-sensitive, staple protein — not a discretionary import a buyer can defer for a quarter while it sorts out its currency position. That is precisely what turns a booming food corridor into a settlement problem.

Where does Brazil export chicken in Africa?

South Africa is the single largest African buyer of Brazilian chicken, importing 325,409 tonnes in 2024 — roughly a third of the continent's total — followed by Libya, Ghana, Angola and the Republic of the Congo, per ABPA's 2024 figures reported by Ecofin Agency. These are markets that lean on Brazil for affordable, halal-certified poultry, and the flow concentrates where two conditions overlap: a structural domestic protein gap and a buyer base that needs the lowest landed price it can find.

South Africa's pull is the clearest. It is a high-volume importer with a domestic poultry industry that cannot fully cover local demand at competitive prices, so it buys Brazilian frozen chicken at scale even while it litigates trade remedies against it. Beyond South Africa, Brazilian chicken flows into Muslim-majority West and North African markets where halal certification is a hard requirement and Brazil's cost advantage is decisive.

The pattern is the same one that runs across the whole Brazil–Africa food trade: cheap, large-volume, must-have calories sold into FX-constrained economies. The full corridor — chicken alongside corn, sugar and beef — is mapped on our hub, the Brazil–Africa trade corridor.

Why does South Africa import chicken from Brazil?

Because Brazilian chicken is cheaper at landed cost than locally produced equivalents, and South Africa's own producers cannot fully meet domestic demand at those prices. The country runs a persistent protein-supply gap, and frozen Brazilian chicken — bone-in portions in particular — fills it at a price point local industry struggles to match.

This is why South Africa imports the meat despite a long-running anti-dumping dispute. South African producers have repeatedly sought and won anti-dumping duties on Brazilian (and other) poultry, arguing the imports are sold below fair value; importers and food-security advocates counter that the cheaper protein is essential for lower-income households. The dispute is real and ongoing — but it has not stopped the trade, because the underlying demand for affordable protein has not gone away. The result is a corridor that keeps clearing 325,000-plus tonnes a year through legal friction.

For a buyer balancing food-price politics against a thin domestic supply, the math keeps pointing back to Brazil. And every one of those tonnes is invoiced in dollars — which is where the problem moves from the trade desk to the treasury desk.

Are Brazil's chicken exports halal-certified for African markets?

Yes. Brazil is the world's largest exporter of halal poultry, and halal certification is a core reason it dominates supply into North Africa and Muslim-majority West Africa. Brazilian processors have built halal-compliant slaughter and certification into their export operations at scale, which is why Brazil — not a Muslim-majority country itself — is the default protein supplier to much of the Islamic world.

That certification is a structural moat, not a marketing line. For importers in markets where halal is a legal and religious requirement, a supplier that can deliver certified product at Brazilian prices and Brazilian volumes has very few substitutes. It is part of why the African chicken corridor has proven durable even through currency crises and trade disputes: the demand is non-discretionary, the certification is non-negotiable, and Brazil is the cheapest source that satisfies both.

The constraint, again, is not supply or certification. It is payment.

Brazil chicken to Africa — the country-pair data

The table states the volume figures with their direction and year. Note the unit difference: the South African tonnage (325,409 t) and the all-goods dollar figure (~$1.45B) measure different things and should never be summed or conflated — the dollar figure covers all Brazilian exports to South Africa, of which meat is one large component, and is analysed on our bilateral page.

Sources: Africa, South Africa and global tonnage from ABPA's 2024 export data, reported by Ecofin Agency and The Poultry Site. The all-goods dollar value is an Artoh-compiled 2024 export figure broken out in full on Brazil–South Africa trade — we reference it here, not rebuild it, and it must not be summed with the tonnage rows above.

How do African importers pay for Brazilian chicken?

In U.S. dollars, sourced through bank foreign-exchange queues — and that is the chokepoint that delays shipments even when the meat is ready to load. Frozen chicken is priced and invoiced in dollars worldwide, so a South African, Nigerian or West African importer does not just need the chicken; it needs to convert local currency into dollars and move them on a trade timeline. When the dollars are scarce, the trade stalls.

The trade-finance data makes the strain concrete. The clearest single corridor break is Nigeria, where import letters of credit collapsed about 57% year on year in 2024, from roughly $912 million to about $392 million over a comparable window, according to Punch reporting on Central Bank of Nigeria data. A letter of credit is a bank's written guarantee that a supplier will be paid once shipping documents are in order — but issuing one requires the importer's bank to commit dollars upfront, which is exactly the thing FX-short banks increasingly could not do. When the LC channel halves, food imports priced in dollars are among the first casualties.

The cost and speed of moving those dollars compound the problem. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world's most expensive region to move money — it costs 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 dollar leg runs on correspondent banking, a network that has been thinning for years: USD correspondent links in Africa fell 25.1% between 2011 and 2017, 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, as tracked in industry coverage of the de-risking trend. Settlement through what remains takes three to five business days, sometimes up to seven, and only 24.7% of sub-Saharan beneficiary-leg payments clear within an hour — joint-slowest globally, per the FSB's 2024 cross-border payments KPIs. The full picture of why those dollars are scarce sits in our pillar on why USD is scarce in Africa.

So the honest answer is: the chicken can ship, but the payment waits on the buyer winning the scramble for dollars first — and the rail that moves them is slow, costly and shrinking.

How can poultry exporters settle faster?

Frozen chicken is non-discretionary protein on a cold-chain clock; it cannot sit in port while a payment waits its turn in an FX-allocation queue. That is the case Treasury-backed stablecoins are built for — 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. They are settlement plumbing, not a trade you place: a Brazilian exporter selling to a rand- or naira-short buyer can clear the dollar leg in minutes against existing liquidity rather than waiting days in a correspondent chain or weeks behind a central-bank allocation. Industry estimates put the cost saving on some corridors as high as 90% against correspondent banking.

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 — and Chainalysis ties Sub-Saharan Africa's high-value on-chain activity directly to cross-border trade flows, per its 2024 geography-of-crypto analysis.

This is not advice to evade foreign-exchange or anti-money-laundering controls. The credible model runs inside the regulated framework, through licensed dealers and a full audit trail — it sits alongside a compliant bank relationship as a faster way to move the dollar leg once buyer and supplier have agreed terms. The rail-by-rail comparison is in B2B cross-border payments with stablecoins, and the plain-terms mechanism in how stablecoins solve dollar shortages in Africa.

Part of

The Brazil–Africa Trade Corridor: A Record $1.39B Single-Month High and How It Settles in Dollars

This page is one cluster in the Brazil–Africa pillar. For the bilateral total behind South Africa's chicken purchases — and why two BRICS members still settle in dollars — see Brazil–South Africa trade; for the full settlement playbook that every commodity cluster points to, see how LatAm exporters get paid in dollar-short Africa.

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

Brazil's chicken corridor into Africa is not constrained by supply, price or certification. Brazil ships nearly a million tonnes of halal-certified frozen chicken to the continent a year, South Africa alone takes 325,409 tonnes of it, and the demand is non-discretionary. The constraint is the dollar in between — the currency the trade is invoiced in, and the one FX-short importers cannot reliably source while letters of credit collapse and correspondent rails thin out.

Artoh gives importers and their suppliers 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 Brazilian exporter gets paid in minutes; the African importer settles the dollar leg without joining the central-bank allocation queue or paying a parallel-market premium. It is settlement infrastructure, not speculation, and it sits alongside — not instead of — a compliant bank relationship. Importers wanting the country-level reference can read the South Africa settlement guide.

If you are importing chicken or other protein from Brazil and watching payments stall on FX availability, let's talk.