Progressive Outlook: What a Week in Nepal Taught Us About Its Maize Market

We went to Kathmandu expecting to learn about a supply problem. We came back convinced the real story is about trust.

Here is the thing that surprised us most: Nepal grows a lot of maize. Over 3 million tons a year, on more than 916,000 hectares it is the country’s second biggest cereal after rice. And yet every year, another 400,000 to 500,000 tons cross the border from India to feed Nepal’s mills. The demand is there. The farmers are there. What is missing is the bridge between them.

That bridge, we kept hearing, is built out of trust. Trust in seed before planting, trust in grain at the buying gate, and trust in the systems meant to connect the two. That is what this post is about.

The demand is already waiting

Walk into any feed mill in Nepal and you will see the pressure firsthand. The poultry sector alone consumes an estimated 3,000 tons of feed a day, and at least half of every bag is maize. Feed demand is growing around 10% a year. Maize production? About 2.5%.

You do not need a spreadsheet to see where that goes. The gap gets filled by imports and those imports are strikingly concentrated. By IndexBox’s estimate, India supplies about 81% of Nepal’s maize import value. One neighbour, one border, one point of exposure to price swings and policy changes that Nepal does not control.

So yes, this is an import substitution story. But we think it’s a better story than that: it is a chance to build a domestic value chain that farmers and processors actually believe in.

What we heard in Kathmandu

Our first long conversation was with CIMMYT’s South Asia team. They have worked on Nepal’s maize systems for decades, and they are now deep in the Maize Commercialization Model that the Government of Nepal is scaling a push to turn spring and winter rice fallows into a productive 90-120 day maize window, backed by better seed, mechanization, services, and market coordination.

Two moments from those discussions stuck with us.

The first was about the farm gate. Farmers told us through the people who work with them every day that they often cannot tell good seed from bad until it is too late. Seed quality decides yield before the season even starts. In a system where yields already sit below their potential, that is a painful place to be guessing.

The second was about the processing gate. CIMMYT introduced us to a large processing unit that buys most of its maize from India. Their concern was not availability. It was consistency. Moisture, damage, physical quality when you are committing to grain by the truckload, “probably fine” is not good enough. Imported grain wins not because it is better, but because it arrives graded, aggregated, and predictable.

And that is the opening. If domestic maize could be assessed quickly and objectively at the seed stage and at intake processors could buy Nepali grain with confidence, and farmers could finally be paid for quality instead of haggling over guesswork.

The problem is not land

Nepal does not need more maize area. It needs the area it has to produce grain that the market can count on. Three constraints came up in almost every conversation:

Yields lag potential. Production has grown over the past decade, but the gap between actual and attainable yields is still wide. Better seed and better agronomy can close a lot of it.

Demand is outrunning supply. Feed mills need maize every single day, and their appetite keeps growing. Until domestic supply catches up, imports fill the gap by default.

The chain is fragmented. Farmers, cooperatives, aggregators, processors, and public institutions each work with their own information and their own idea of what “good maize” means. Without a shared quality standard, domestic grain competes at a permanent disadvantage.

Strip away the jargon and it is simple: the farmer wants a fair price, the processor wants reliable grain, and neither has a way to prove quality to the other. That is the missing link.

Where we think RootsGoods fits

We left Kathmandu with a fairly clear picture of where objective, affordable quality assessment could slot into the chain and where it should not try to do everything at once.

The honest version: we would start small. A seed stage pilot with CIMMYT linked networks, where a quality check before planting aligns directly with Nepal’s push for stronger hybrid seed systems. A procurement side pilot with the processing unit we met, where consistent intake measurement could shift real purchasing decisions toward domestic grain.

And then, if those work, the government’s scale up of the Maize Commercialization Model offers a route to something bigger. The model is already built around public-private partnerships and bundled services a quality layer fits it naturally. Nepal is compact enough to pilot meaningfully, and large enough for the results to matter across an entire national value chain. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

A word on geography

People tend to describe Nepal’s position wedged between India and China as a constraint. For maize, we are not so sure.

India, to the south, is Nepal’s dominant maize supplier. But India’s own maize demand is shifting fast, pulled by feed, starch, and ethanol. As regional supply tightens, depending on Indian maize gets more expensive and less predictable. China, to the north, is one of the largest grain demand centres and second largest maize producer on the planet. Nepal will not become a maize exporter overnight and it should not try to. But sitting between two agricultural giants is a very good reason to build domestic resilience first.

The goal for the next few years is not export scale. It is self-reliance, quality, and trust inside Nepal’s own maize system.

Where we go from here

We flew home more convinced than when we arrived: Nepal is one of the most relevant early markets for our quality assessment work. Strong demand, an active feed sector, a persistent import gap, public institutions already pushing commercial maize and on both sides of the market, people who would clearly benefit from a trustworthy way to measure quality.

Our next steps are concrete: explore the procurement pilot with the processor, scope the seed quality pilot with CIMMYT linked networks, and keep the conversation going about where this fits in Nepal’s wider maize commercialization push.

Nepal may sit between two agricultural giants, but its maize opportunity is its own. Better seed, honest quality measurement, and a little more trust between farmers and buyers that is a realistic path off import dependence. We would like to help build it.