Argentina has shipped more than 600,000 metric tons of corn to China since April 2026, the largest volume on record for the trade route, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS).
The shipments mark a sharp reversal for a market that Argentina was largely locked out of for more than a decade.
Key Facts
- COFCO International, China's largest state-owned agricultural trading company, has chartered more than 600,000 metric tons of Argentine corn since April 2026. This is the largest volume on record for this trade route, per USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service.
- The surge follows new export protocols Argentina and China agreed to in 2024, after which shipments stayed near zero through the 2024/25 season.
- Argentine corn has been running $10 to $15 per metric ton cheaper than rival origins in recent months, per USDA. That gap is helping drive the shift.
The shipments track data from Agencia Marítima NABSA S.A., an Argentine ship agency that USDA and other trade trackers rely on for destination-level export data. Argentina's official customs figures often group shipments under a "confidential" designation, which obscures where cargoes are actually headed.
Why Argentina Was Nearly Absent From China's Corn Market Until Now
Argentina's absence from China's corn trade wasn't about supply. A lengthy phytosanitary approval process kept the country largely shut out for more than a decade, while Brazil, the United States, and Ukraine supplied the bulk of what China imported instead.
Clearing that regulatory barrier in 2024 didn't immediately open the trade. Chinese import demand was softer that year, and Argentina's own corn crop came in smaller. Together, those two factors likely kept shipments close to zero through the entire 2024/25 marketing year, according to USDA.
The shift became visible in April 2026, when COFCO International loaded a roughly 34,000-metric-ton cargo of Argentine corn at its Timbúes port terminal, bound for China's animal feed sector.
COFCO said in a statement at the time that the shipment reflected closer alignment between the two markets and gave Chinese buyers another supply origin to draw from. Bloomberg, which first reported the cargo, described it as the first bulk shipment of its kind between the two countries in more than 15 years.
Competitive Pricing and a Record Harvest Behind the Shift
Argentine corn has simply been the cheaper option lately. USDA pegs the recent price gap at $10 to $15 per metric ton under rival origins.
That pricing edge has lined up with a bigger Argentine harvest this season. Exporters simply have more volume to sell as a result. The newly reopened Chinese market gives them somewhere to put it.
USDA doesn't treat the current pace as guaranteed. Three pressures could slow it:
- Softer Chinese corn demand overall
- The direction of ongoing trade negotiations between China and the United States
- A large second corn crop coming out of Brazil
Any one of them could narrow the price gap or cool the import appetite that has driven this season's volume.
China Was Absent From Argentina's Top Corn Buyers Just Months Ago
The scale of the shift is clearest against where Argentina's corn was actually going before this year.
A separate USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report, published in April 2026, ranked Argentina's top 10 corn export destinations for calendar year 2025 using the same Nabsa Shipping Agency tracking data.
China did not appear on that list at all.
Vietnam led Argentina's corn buyers in calendar year 2025 at 5.33 million metric tons, followed by Peru at 4.37 million and Malaysia at 3.15 million, according to USDA's April 2026 report. China falls somewhere below Morocco's 10th-place total of 780,000 metric tons for the full year, if it bought any measurable volume at all. The 600,000-plus metric tons COFCO has chartered since April 2026 alone already approaches what some of last year's top 10 buyers took in over twelve full months.
Argentina wasn't gradually scaling up sales to China. China barely registered a year ago and has already moved enough corn in a few months to sit alongside longer-established buyers.
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