Why Nepal Imports More Food Than It Grows: The Surprising Opportunity

Last updated: September 2026. Figures below are drawn from the Department of Customs, Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MoALD), FAO and the WTO, with fiscal years and sources stated throughout.

Nepal’s agriculture import bill is no longer a side detail in the country’s trade story — it is a large part of the story. In fiscal year 2025/26, Nepal’s total merchandise imports reached roughly Rs 2.096 trillion against exports of about Rs 315 billion, and agricultural and food products remain one of the largest single blocks inside that number. But “Nepal imports too much food” is a thin explanation for something structurally more interesting.

This article looks at what Nepal actually imports, category by category, why each category is imported rather than grown, where the money is really going, which imports are genuinely hard to replace, and which ones represent realistic opportunities for Nepali farmers, processors and investors over the next several years. Where two credible reports disagree on a number, both are shown, with the most likely explanation for the gap — rather than one figure being quietly picked and the other dropped.

How Much Does Nepal Import in Agriculture and Food?

Nepal’s overall trade position is stark. According to the Department of Customs, total merchandise imports for FY2025/26 (mid-July 2025 to mid-July 2026) came to roughly Rs 2.096 trillion, a 16.2 percent increase over the previous year, while exports reached about Rs 315 billion. For every rupee Nepal earned in exports that year, it spent roughly Rs 6.65 on imports.

Agriculture and food make up a large, specific slice of that total. For FY2024/25, the most complete cross-checkable year, two outlets reported different headline totals: the Kathmandu Post put the agricultural import bill at Rs 360 billion (about US$2.57 billion), while The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra’s English daily) reported Rs 394.86 billion — 54 percent higher than FY2023/24’s Rs 256.75 billion. Both articles independently state the same export figure for the year (about Rs 277 billion), which is a useful cross-check that both are drawing on the same underlying Department of Customs release.

The gap between the two import totals is real and worth explaining rather than glossing over. Adding up the specific categories the Kathmandu Post itemised (crude oil, rice and paddy, fertiliser, maize, rapeseed oil, apples, potatoes, garlic and vegetables) comes to roughly Rs 320 billion — about Rs 40 billion short of its own Rs 360 billion headline, implying a smaller “everything else” category (dairy, tea and coffee, animal feed, live animals and similar).

Doing the same exercise for The Rising Nepal’s itemised categories (cereals, crude oil, vegetables and lentils, fruits) comes to roughly Rs 265 billion — about Rs 130 billion short of its Rs 394.86 billion headline, implying a considerably larger unitemised category. This pattern suggests The Rising Nepal’s total includes a wider set of agriculture-adjacent categories than the Kathmandu Post’s, though neither outlet published its exact customs-chapter list, so this explanation is the most plausible inference from the numbers rather than a confirmed fact.

Looking further back, a Department of Customs-based series reported by myRepublica shows agricultural imports rising from Rs 171.30 billion in FY2018/19 to Rs 296.30 billion in FY2022/23, easing to Rs 256.75 billion in FY2023/24, then climbing sharply again in FY2024/25 — consistent in direction with both FY2024/25 figures above, even where the exact totals diverge. A separate Kathmandu Post historical reference put the FY2009/10 total at Rs 44.43 billion, implying roughly an eightfold increase over a decade and a half.

For FY2025/26 — a gap in the public record when this article was first drafted — a confirmed full-year figure is now available: the Kathmandu Post reported the food import bill at Rs 434.26 billion for the fiscal year, describing it as a rebound after a brief slowdown driven by India’s earlier export restrictions, now reversing as New Delhi eases exports of staples such as rice.

That marks a jump of roughly 20 percent over FY2024/25’s Rs 360 billion Kathmandu Post figure (or a smaller gap if compared against The Rising Nepal’s higher FY2024/25 baseline of Rs 394.86 billion) — consistent with the partial-year data trend already visible before the full-year number was published: agricultural and livestock imports topped Rs 150 billion in the first five months of FY2025/26, and food grain imports alone reached Rs 46.70 billion in the first ten months, nearing the full previous year’s food-grain total of Rs 59.92 billion, according to Department of Customs data reported by myRepublica.

What Does Nepal Import? Major Categories

The table below uses FY2024/25 as the anchor year, since it is the most recent year with two independently reported, largely cross-checkable full-year datasets. Where a category also has notable FY2025/26 partial-year data, that is stated separately rather than blended into the same figure, so the two fiscal years are never combined in a single number. Where the Kathmandu Post and The Rising Nepal agree closely on FY2024/25, one representative figure is shown with both sources cited; where they diverge meaningfully, both figures are shown.

Sources: Kathmandu Post, “Nepal’s food import bill hits Rs360 billion as India eases curbs,” Aug 4, 2025, and “Food is now Nepal’s next biggest dependency after fuel,” Jul 27, 2026 (Department of Customs, FY2024/25 and FY2025/26 full-year data respectively); The Rising Nepal, “Import of agricultural goods soars to Rs. 400 bn,” Aug 11, 2025 (Department of Customs, FY2024/25 full-year data); Khabarhub, “Nepal’s imports reach Rs 2.09 trillion in FY 2025/26,” 2026 (Department of Customs, FY2025/26 full-year commodity data); myRepublica and myRepublica reports (Department of Customs, FY2025/26 partial-year data); Himalayan Times, Aug 23, 2026 (Plant Quarantine Office, Kakarbhitta border data). Dairy products are not included as a distinct line in this table because no matching figure could be confirmed across sources for either fiscal year.

Why Does Nepal Import So Much Agricultural and Food Produce?

No single cause explains Nepal’s import dependence — it is a stack of structural problems that compound each other.

Low productivity is the most-cited factor. Nepal’s paddy yield of about 3.8 tonnes per hectare sits well below neighbouring countries, and similar productivity gaps exist across maize, wheat and most vegetables. The Department of Agriculture has attributed this directly to a shortage of improved seed varieties, inconsistent fertiliser supply, weak irrigation coverage, and limited use of farm machinery.

Fragmented landholding makes mechanisation and commercial-scale farming difficult, since most farms remain small, scattered plots rather than the consolidated holdings that make investment in machinery or irrigation infrastructure worthwhile.

Labour migration has pulled working-age people out of farming villages toward foreign employment and urban centres, leaving farmland underused or unused — a pattern that Nepali economic commentary consistently links to rising remittance-funded consumption paired with falling domestic production capacity.

Storage and cold-chain limitations mean that even when Nepal produces a seasonal surplus of vegetables or fruit, that surplus cannot always be held over to cover the off-season, so imports fill the gap even in years when total annual domestic production might, on paper, look adequate.

Weak processing capacity compounds this: without adequate cold storage, drying, milling or packaging infrastructure, post-harvest losses remain high, and value-added processed foods (from dairy to packaged fruit products) are imported rather than manufactured domestically.

Rising and changing consumer demand plays a role that is often underweighted. As incomes and remittance-driven purchasing power have grown, urban Nepali consumers increasingly prefer fine and aromatic rice varieties, imported apples and packaged dairy products that Nepal either doesn’t grow in volume or doesn’t process to the expected standard.

The FY2025/26 rebound in the food import bill, discussed above, is itself partly a demand-side story: analysts have linked it to India easing earlier restrictions on staple exports, which allowed pent-up Nepali demand for rice and other staples to flow back into import volumes.

Seed and input dependence, covered in more detail below, means that even where farmers want to expand production, they are often buying the basic inputs — hybrid seed, in particular — from abroad in the first place.

Nepal’s Dependence on India

India is not just Nepal’s largest trading partner — it is the backbone of Nepal’s entire agricultural supply chain. In FY2025/26, India supplied close to 58 percent of Nepal’s total imports, and India together with China accounted for about 78 percent of everything Nepal imports, according to Department of Customs data reported by both Nepal News and The Rising Nepal — two independent write-ups of the same underlying release, which strengthens confidence in this specific figure.

No other single country comes close; Argentina was the next-largest single source in FY2025/26, but at roughly Rs 116 billion, driven almost entirely by crude soybean oil used as feedstock for Nepal’s edible-oil processing and re-export industry — a fraction of India’s or China’s totals.

This dependence exists for straightforward structural reasons rather than any single policy choice: Nepal shares an open border with India, transport costs from Indian markets are far lower than from any overseas supplier, and decades of integrated supply chains already move fuel, construction materials, vehicles, fertiliser and food across that border daily. For perishable agricultural goods in particular — fresh vegetables, fruit, dairy — India’s proximity is close to irreplaceable at current infrastructure levels.

That dependence carries real risk. India has periodically restricted exports of rice, wheat, sugar, onions and paddy to protect its own domestic supply, and each restriction has visibly moved prices and availability inside Nepal. When India tightened rice export policy in the early 2020s, Nepal had to formally request tonnage-specific quotas — including a private-sector allocation capped at 5,000 tonnes per company — through mechanisms like India’s National Cooperative Export Limited, simply to keep import volumes flowing. Fertiliser supply carries a similar exposure, since Nepal manufactures essentially none of its own.

It would be an exaggeration, though, to describe Nepal as simply “at India’s mercy.” Nepal also benefits substantially from the relationship — most visibly through the edible-oil re-export arrangement discussed next, which exists only because of preferential access to the Indian market. The honest picture is interdependence with an uneven power balance, not one-directional dependence.

The Hidden Story Behind Edible-Oil Imports

Edible oil is Nepal’s single largest agricultural import line by value, and on the surface that looks like a straightforward food-security problem. It isn’t, entirely.

Nepal imports crude soybean, sunflower and palm oil — mostly from Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and similar sources — refines it domestically to a limited degree, and then re-exports much of it to India, taking advantage of zero-duty access under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) and the Nepal-India Trade Treaty.

In FY2024/25, Nepal imported crude oil worth roughly Rs 144.79–145.13 billion (a figure that closely matches across two independent reports); in the same period, refined oil exports to India reached roughly Rs 121.53–146.05 billion depending on the exact months compared, according to Kathmandu Post reporting. The same dynamic persisted into FY2025/26: crude soybean oil and its raw materials were Nepal’s second-largest single import commodity nationally at Rs 132.77 billion, while soybean oil and related products were simultaneously Nepal’s largest single export category at Rs 128.74 billion, according to Department of Customs data reported by Khabarhub — import and export figures that sit close enough together, in the same fiscal year, to make the re-export pattern visible in a single data release rather than only across separate reports.

The mix inside that oil-import figure shifted sharply within FY2024/25: soybean oil imports rose by roughly 711 percent year-on-year according to The Rising Nepal, while crude palm oil imports fell by around 92 percent over the same period — a swing that lines up with reporting elsewhere on changing Indian import duty differentials between soybean and palm oil, which directly affects which crude oil is more profitable to route through Nepal for re-export.

Indian industry groups, including the Indian Vegetable Oil Producers’ Association, have argued that the actual domestic value addition happening inside Nepal is only around 5 to 7 percent — well short of the 30 percent domestic value-addition threshold SAFTA is meant to require. Trade experts quoted by the Kathmandu Post have made the same point directly: if Nepal were genuinely adding value, its imports of crude oil would be lower than its exports of refined oil, not higher, as the data currently shows.

This matters for how the headline “food import bill” should be read. A meaningful share of Nepal’s crude-oil import volume is not destined for Nepali kitchens at all — it passes through Nepal on its way to the Indian market, taking advantage of a tariff gap rather than genuine Nepali food demand. That doesn’t make the trade illegitimate, but it does mean crude edible-oil import figures overstate Nepal’s actual domestic edible-oil consumption, and any policy response aimed at “food security” should be careful to separate the re-export volume from the volume Nepalis actually eat — a distinction that also applies to reading the FY2025/26 Rs 434.26 billion food-import total: a real, but unquantified in current public reporting, share of it is oil in transit to India rather than food consumed in Nepal.

Rice Imports: Why an Agricultural Country Still Buys Rice

Rice is Nepal’s staple crop and its most politically visible import. Nepal’s annual rice requirement is estimated at roughly 3.8–4 million tonnes, while domestic production runs somewhat below that, creating a persistent shortfall that imports cover.

The productivity gap is the central issue: Nepal’s average paddy yield of about 3.8 tonnes per hectare compares unfavourably with India’s roughly 4.5 tonnes, Vietnam’s roughly 5.5 tonnes, and China’s roughly 6 tonnes, according to comparative yield data cited across multiple Nepali agricultural analyses. A former agriculture secretary has been quoted estimating that Nepal would need to produce around 6.4 million metric tonnes of paddy annually to stop importing rice altogether — nearly double current output.

In FY2024/25 (full year), rice and paddy imports were reported at Rs 40.18 billion (The Rising Nepal: paddy Rs 21.52 billion plus rice Rs 18.66 billion) to Rs 43.42 billion (Kathmandu Post’s breakdown), both sources agreeing this represented a sharp jump — roughly 81 percent year-on-year according to The Rising Nepal — from FY2023/24’s Rs 22.23 billion. Overall cereal imports (paddy, rice, maize, wheat, barley, millet and buckwheat combined) reached 1.18 million tonnes worth Rs 60.76 billion in FY2024/25, up from Rs 45.78 billion the year before.

For FY2025/26, the only confirmed figure available at the time of writing covers the first ten months, not the full year: rice and paddy imports of Rs 35.53 billion (201,916 tonnes of rice worth Rs 15.76 billion, plus 496,989 tonnes of paddy worth Rs 19.77 billion), according to Department of Customs records reported by myRepublica. This is deliberately kept separate from the FY2024/25 full-year figures above rather than compared directly, since a 10-month total and a 12-month total are not like-for-like.

Can Nepal realistically reduce rice imports? Partially, yes — but not eliminate them. Yield improvement through better seed varieties, expanded irrigation and reduced post-harvest loss could close a meaningful part of the gap over time. What is unlikely to change is urban demand for fine, aromatic and basmati rice varieties that Nepal does not grow at scale; that portion of the import bill reflects consumer preference rather than production failure, and no realistic domestic breeding programme changes that quickly.

Vegetable and Fruit Imports

Nepal imported vegetables and lentils worth roughly Rs 37.73–38.50 billion in FY2024/25 (full year), up from about Rs 28.31 billion in FY2023/24, according to the two main sources reviewed. Within that total: potatoes came to Rs 7.67–8.38 billion, garlic to Rs 6.75–7 billion, onions to Rs 4.42 billion, red lentils to Rs 5.92 billion, dried chickpeas to Rs 3.35 billion, dried beans to Rs 3.87 billion, and tomatoes to Rs 571 million (all Rising Nepal figures except where a range is shown).

For FY2025/26, no matching full national total was confirmed in the sources reviewed; a partial figure is available for a single border crossing — fresh produce entering through just Kakarbhitta in the east totalled Rs 24.27 billion in FY2025/26 alone, with tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, apples and watermelons among the largest categories, according to Plant Quarantine Office data reported by the Himalayan Times. That figure covers one crossing point, not the country, and should not be read as a national vegetable-import total.

Fruit imports reached Rs 21.17 billion in FY2024/25, up 8 percent from Rs 19.57 billion in FY2023/24 and Rs 16.16 billion in FY2022/23 — a steady upward trend. Apples dominate this category, accounting for close to half of total fruit-import value; The Rising Nepal put apple imports specifically at Rs 10.55 billion, while the Kathmandu Post separately reported Rs 12.16 billion for the same fiscal year — a roughly 15 percent gap between the two that could not be resolved from the sources available, and is flagged here rather than silently averaged. Bananas (Rs 2.30 billion), grapes (Rs 1.91 billion), pomegranates (Rs 892 million), mangoes (Rs 642 million) and lemons (Rs 601 million) made up most of the remainder, per The Rising Nepal.

This category is different in character from cereals or edible oil. Nepal’s mid-hills and Tarai are agro-climatically capable of growing most of these vegetables and fruits domestically — the constraint is timing and infrastructure, not land or climate. When Nepali harvests are in season, prices fall and imports typically decline; between seasons, weak cold storage and limited processing mean imports fill the gap even though annual domestic production, summed across the year, might otherwise appear sufficient. That timing mismatch is precisely why vegetables and fruit represent one of the more realistic import-substitution opportunities in this article.

Seed and Input Dependency

Underneath every other import category sits a more basic dependency: seed. A figure widely repeated since 2019 — citing Nepali agriculture scientists in the Kathmandu Post — puts vegetable seed import dependence at over 90 percent of volume planted, alongside roughly 30 percent of maize seed and 15 percent of rice seed. This same figure has been repeated in more recent academic reviews of Nepal’s hybrid-seed sector, which at minimum suggests the underlying dependency has not been widely reported as having improved.

That said, this figure deserves a caveat this article did not apply clearly enough in an earlier draft: separate academic literature on Nepal’s vegetable seed sector describes a related but distinct metric — a “formal seed replacement rate” of around 70 percent (meaning 70 percent of planted seed comes from the formal sector, whether domestic or imported, versus farmer-saved seed), with Nepal’s National Seed Vision (2013–2025) setting a policy target of raising that replacement rate above 90 percent by 2025. In other words, one strand of the literature describes “>90% imported” as a present-tense fact, while another describes “90% formal seed use” as a target still being pursued. No single, recent, official MoALD or NARC release stating a current national import-dependency percentage for vegetable seed could be located during this research, so readers should treat the 90-percent figure as a widely cited but unverified-at-source estimate rather than a confirmed current statistic.

What is better supported is the direction and structural logic: Nepal was, within living memory, a seed-exporting country, and hybrid seed for vegetables, maize and other crops is now sourced substantially from India, China, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. This matters for food security in a way that is easy to overlook — a country dependent on imported seed for its staple and vegetable crops is exposed to supply disruption before a single seed is even planted, and hybrid seed also requires farmers to purchase new stock each season rather than saving it, increasing input costs and financial dependence on external suppliers. Reversing that trend requires sustained investment in national seed research (through institutions like the Nepal Agricultural Research Council), certified seed multiplication capacity, and private-sector seed enterprises — a structural, multi-year fix rather than a policy announcement away from being solved.

Is Nepal Really Unable to Feed Itself?

The honest answer is more layered than either “yes, hopelessly” or “no, it’s fine.” It depends which question is actually being asked.

• Production capacity — for most staple crops (rice, maize, wheat, most vegetables), Nepal’s land and climate are capable of producing enough to meet domestic demand, at least in principle.
• Commercial-scale production — this is where the gap opens up. Nepal’s farms remain overwhelmingly smallholder and subsistence-oriented, which limits the volume, consistency and cost-competitiveness needed to displace imports at scale.
• Year-round supply — even where annual production is adequate on paper, weak storage means supply is uneven across the year, forcing seasonal import dependence regardless of the annual total.
• Affordability — Indian agricultural products often reach Nepali markets more cheaply than domestic equivalents, partly because of India’s own agricultural subsidies, which Nepali producers cannot match.
• Distribution — poor rural roads and market linkages mean that even successful harvests in remote districts can fail to reach urban demand centres in time or in good condition.
• Processing and storage capacity — value-added and shelf-stable food products (dairy, packaged fruit, milled grain products) are frequently imported not because Nepal lacks the raw material, but because it lacks the processing industry to turn that raw material into the product consumers actually buy.

Put together, Nepal is not incapable of feeding itself in a technical, land-and-climate sense. It is, however, structurally unable to do so at current productivity, storage, processing and market-organisation levels — which is a solvable but slow-moving problem, not a permanent one.

What Could Nepal Realistically Produce More Of?

Based on climate suitability, existing production experience, domestic demand size and the scale of current imports, several categories stand out as genuinely realistic opportunities rather than aspirational talking points.

Vegetables — potato, tomato, onion, garlic and similar crops already grow well across Nepal’s mid-hills and Tarai; the constraint is storage and off-season supply, both solvable through targeted infrastructure investment rather than new agronomy.

Mustard and rapeseed oil — unlike soybean or palm, mustard is a crop Nepal already grows domestically; expanding acreage and local oil-pressing capacity is a far shorter path to import reduction than trying to compete in soybean or palm oil, which Nepal’s climate does not support at commercial scale.

Dairy — Nepal’s cooperative dairy sector is already expanding, supported by its own capital subsidy under the FY2026/27 budget; further investment in processing (cheese, UHT milk, milk powder) could displace a meaningful share of currently imported dairy products.

Aquaculture (notably Pangasius fish) — FAO’s Hand-in-Hand country programme for Nepal identifies fish as a priority commodity, noting that around 60 percent of national fish demand is currently imported despite Nepal’s per-capita fish consumption being relatively modest; FAO frames this as a clear import-substitution target.

Potato value addition — FAO’s Nepal investment profile separately flags potato processing (chips, starch, and related products) as an underdeveloped opportunity, since Nepal already produces potatoes at volume but imports many processed potato products.

Lentils and pulses — Nepal is simultaneously a lentil exporter and a pulse importer, which is less contradictory than it sounds: Nepal grows and exports specific lentil varieties competitively while still importing pulse types and off-season volumes it does not grow. Strengthening the existing lentil value chain is a lower-risk opportunity than starting a new crop category from zero.

What is not on this list matters just as much: soybean oil, palm oil and large-scale industrial fertiliser production are not realistic substitution targets in the medium term. Nepal’s climate does not support soy or palm at commercial scale, and building fertiliser manufacturing capacity from nothing is a large, capital-intensive undertaking with a long payback horizon.

Import Replacement Opportunity Map

What This Means for Nepalese Farmers

None of this translates into guaranteed profit for any individual farmer — import-substitution opportunities are real, but they still depend on execution, market access and capital. That said, a few practical implications follow directly from the data above.

• Vegetable and off-season production carries the clearest near-term opportunity, particularly where a farmer has, or can access, basic storage infrastructure.
• Mustard cultivation and small-scale oil-pressing sit in a genuinely favourable position compared with trying to compete in imported oilseeds Nepal cannot grow.
• Farmers already growing lentils or other pulses for export have a stronger existing market position than those starting a new crop from scratch.
• Dependence on imported hybrid seed is a real cost and risk that farmers should factor into planning, not assume will resolve on its own.
• Government subsidy programmes (insurance premium subsidy, the FY2026/27 dairy and investment incentives) are worth checking against official MoALD and Ministry of Finance notices before being factored into a business plan, since several announced schemes have lagged behind their implementation timelines.

What This Means for Businesses and Investors

The categories above point toward a fairly specific set of investable opportunities rather than “agriculture in general”:

• Commercial farming in vegetables, mustard/oilseed and aquaculture, where Nepal has both demand and agro-climatic fit
• Farmer aggregation models that consolidate smallholder output into commercially viable volumes
• Cold storage targeted specifically at closing the seasonal vegetable and fruit supply gap
• Food processing, especially dairy (cheese, UHT milk, powder) and potato value-addition (chips, starch)
• Seed production and certified seed multiplication, particularly for vegetables and maize
• Agricultural logistics connecting production districts to urban demand centres
• Irrigation infrastructure, which underlies almost every yield-improvement opportunity on this list
• Livestock and feed, where domestic maize supply is structurally behind the growth of the poultry and dairy sectors it feeds
• Agricultural technology addressing post-harvest loss, grading and cold-chain monitoring

Readers exploring lower-capital entry points can look at existing models like organic honey farming in Nepal or cardamom farming in Nepal, both of which sit in categories where Nepal is already a net exporter rather than an importer. For a look at Nepal’s current investment-incentive landscape more broadly, see Nepal Agriculture Subsidy 2026/27, and for certified organic export potential, organic farming in Nepal. For the government’s own current thinking on the sector, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development publishes its policy documents and budget notices directly.

Can Nepal Reduce Agricultural Imports?

Partially — and unevenly across categories. Nepal can realistically reduce imports of vegetables, mustard oil, dairy, lentils and farmed fish over a multi-year horizon, through a combination of storage infrastructure, processing investment, seed system development and targeted acreage expansion. These are not quick wins, but they are achievable ones, and several are already underway through cooperative dairy expansion, FAO-backed potato and fish programmes, and existing lentil export capacity. The FY2025/26 rebound to Rs 434.26 billion in food imports is, if anything, a reminder that these gains are fragile: they can be quickly reversed by external factors like India relaxing export curbs, rather than reflecting a change in Nepal’s own production capacity.

Nepal cannot realistically eliminate its dependence on imported soybean and palm oil, since its climate does not support commercial cultivation of either crop — the honest goal there is managing the re-export relationship transparently, not replacing the raw material. Chemical fertiliser imports face a similar structural ceiling in the short-to-medium term, since building domestic manufacturing capacity from nothing is a large industrial undertaking, not an agricultural policy change. And a portion of rice and fruit imports reflects consumer preference for varieties Nepal doesn’t grow at scale — a demand-side reality no supply-side policy fixes quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Data

• Department of Customs, Government of Nepal — primary source for all import/export values cited, via its annual and periodic trade statistics releases.
• Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) — “Current Macroeconomic and Financial Situation” reports (annual, based on mid-July 2026 data for FY2025/26; and nine-month/eight-month interim reports for FY2025/26).
• Kathmandu Post — “Nepal’s food import bill hits Rs360 billion as India eases curbs” (Aug 4, 2025); “Food is now Nepal’s next biggest dependency after fuel” (Jul 27, 2026), reporting the FY2025/26 full-year food import bill of Rs 434.26 billion; “Nepal’s Rs146 billion edible oil exports to India under scrutiny over tariff advantage” (Jul 25, 2026); “High-value exports falter as Nepal’s export growth rides on re-exported edible oil” (Jan 26, 2026); “Nepal’s growing reliance on imported hybrid seeds risks devastating consequences” (Sept 7, 2019).
• The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra) — “Import of agricultural goods soars to Rs. 400 bn” (Aug 11, 2025); “Nepal bears deficit with 128 nations” (Aug 8, 2026), reporting the FY2025/26 India/China import-share breakdown.
• myRepublica (Nagarik Network) — “Declining farmland and poor irrigation drive up Nepal’s agriculture import bill” (May 2026); “Nepal imports paddy and rice worth Rs 35.53 billion in 10 months” (Jun 18, 2026).
• Nepal News (English) — “Everything You Need to Know About Nepal’s Trade in FY 2025/26 (First 10 Months)” (May 22, 2026); “Nepal’s trade deficit hits Rs 1.78 trillion…” (Jul 2026); “Agro products worth over Rs 24 b imported from Eastern border point” (Aug 2026). Note: a separate Nepal News long-read on the National Agriculture Policy 2026 (Aug 8, 2026) cites an “Rs 360 billion” agricultural import figure while describing it as the “full previous fiscal year” — this appears to reuse the FY2024/25 figure rather than report a distinct FY2025/26 total, and is not used here as a source for any FY2025/26 number.
• Khabarhub — “Nepal’s imports reach Rs 2.09 trillion in FY 2025/26; exports surpass Rs 315 billion” (2026), reporting FY2025/26 commodity-level import and export data including crude soybean oil.
• The Himalayan Times — “From rice to apples, Rs 24b of farm goods enter via Kakarbhitta” (Aug 23, 2026).
• FAO Hand-in-Hand Initiative, Nepal Country Profile (2026) — arable land, GDP and employment shares; potato and Pangasius fish as priority import-substitution commodities.
• World Bank, Nepal Development Update (April 2026) — trade deficit outlook, crude edible oil re-export dynamics, current account and reserves.
• World Trade Organization, Trade Policy Review of Nepal, WT/TPR/S/478 (Sept 22, 2025) — Nepal’s average applied MFN tariff on agricultural products under the WTO definition.
• Academic literature on Nepal’s vegetable seed sector, including “Socio-economic analysis of vegetable seed production in Nepal” (Agricultural Science and Technology, 2022) and “Supply Situation of Vegetable Seeds in Nepal: An Analysis from Policy Perspective” — cited for the formal seed replacement rate and National Seed Vision 2013–2025 target, as a caveat against the more commonly cited 90%-import figure.

Where two sources disagree, this article states both figures and the fiscal year involved, rather than presenting a single number as definitive. Where a figure could only be found for a partial fiscal year, it is labeled as such and never combined with a full-year total from a different period. Readers who need an exact figure for a specific fiscal year for legal, financial or policy purposes should verify directly against the Department of Customs’ published trade statistics for that year.