Sectors served / Commodity traders

Food and farming, from the
growing zone to the port

A crop is exposed to the same five things an oilfield is. Who holds the export licence and on what condition. Whether the labour turns up. Whether the road to the port is open. Which way the politics is turning. What the contract with the marketing board actually says.

The problem

The decision is made in a district, not a capital

A state board sets a farmgate price. An export licence is suspended in one province. A quarantine closes a growing zone. A route to the port is taxed by an armed group. None of that reaches a price series until it has already moved the price, and by the time it is news your counterparty has been trading on it for weeks.

Indonesia announced a palm oil export ban on 27 April 2022 that took effect the following day. India banned non-basmati rice exports on 20 July 2023 and did not lift it until September 2024. Neither was a forecast anyone could buy.

What we watch

Five things that decide
whether it keeps running

Licensing and permits

Export licences and registration with a marketing board, phytosanitary certificates, quarantine on an infected zone, and the quotas and minimum export prices that appear with a day of notice.

Labour

Whether the harvest crew turns up, union action at the plantation or the port, and findings of forced or child labour, which close a market rather than a farm.

Security

Roadblocks and informal taxation between the growing zone and the port, crop moving across a border to a better price, and conflict that closes a collection route.

Political change

Export bans and taxes, subsidy and fuel decisions, elections that move a farmgate price, and controls on what an exporter may do with its foreign currency.

Contract terms

What the board sets, what the pre-export finance obliges, and how an offtake or a plantation concession is renegotiated when the government changes.

Why it is being bought now

The rules now require
you to know the district

Compliance used to be satisfied by a country score. It is now satisfied by evidence about a place.

The EU deforestation regulation covers cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm, rubber, soy and wood. It applies from 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators, and from 30 June 2027 for micro and small enterprises, after a second delay agreed at the end of 2025. It asks for the location of the plot and proof that the crop was legal under the producing country’s own law.

The United States forced labour law has been in force since June 2022 and treats cotton as a priority sector. Withhold release orders have already closed the US market to named palm oil producers.

Neither obligation is met by a price series or an index. Both require someone to establish what is true in a specific place, on a date, with the sources attached.

Where it matters

The countries we open next
are farming countries

Colombia is coffee and bananas, with a quarantine running in the banana zones since 2019. Rwanda licenses and prices coffee and tea through a national board whose trading rules changed as recently as 2023. Pakistan is cotton, rice and wheat, where a provincial decision on procurement moves a farmgate price faster than any market does. Mexico is fresh produce, where the labour mechanisms in the trade agreement now reach agriculture.

Collection runs in Venezuela today. The four countries above are in build. We will tell you plainly whether we cover where you are exposed before you buy anything, and we would rather lose the sale than imply a desk that does not exist. See where collection stands.

Where to start