The United States exports more food than any other country, shipping roughly $172 billion worth of agricultural and food products abroad in 2024. But the old image of a lone American giant feeding the world is out of date. Brazil and the Netherlands now rival the United States by value, China has become the world’s largest food buyer rather than a leading seller, and a single war has reordered the global grain trade. The map of who feeds the world is more crowded, and more fragile, than it used to be.
Measuring food exports is not as simple as it sounds. International agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Trade Organization track “agricultural products,” a category that captures food staples like cereals, meat, and dairy alongside some non-food farm goods such as cotton, tobacco, and cut flowers. By that standard measure, global agricultural trade passed $2 trillion in 2024, and a handful of countries account for most of it.
The Largest Food Exporters Today
| Rank | Country | Agricultural and Food Exports, 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | ~$172 billion |
| 2 | Brazil | ~$142 billion |
| 3 | Netherlands | ~$134 billion |
| 4 | Germany | ~$102 billion |
| 5 | France | ~$83 billion |
| 6 | Spain | ~$74 billion |
| 7 | China | ~$72 billion |
| 8 | Italy | ~$71 billion |
| 9 | Canada | ~$65 billion |
| 10 | Poland | ~$54 billion |
Figures show approximate 2024 export values for agricultural and food products, drawn from UN Comtrade and FAO trade data. Totals include some non-food farm goods and are rounded. Taken as a single bloc rather than as individual members, the European Union is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, but its biggest producers also rank near the top on their own
The United States
The United States remains the single largest national exporter, built on enormous output of soybeans, corn, and meat, plus dairy, wheat, and tree nuts. Its top customers are Canada, Mexico, China, and Japan. The country’s scale is matched by its appetite, however. The United States is also one of the world’s two largest food importers, buying nearly $200 billion in agricultural goods a year, which means its towering export figure tells only half the story of its place in the food trade.
Brazil and the Netherlands
Brazil has been the great mover of the past two decades, climbing to second place on the strength of soybeans, beef, sugar, coffee, poultry, and corn. Its single largest trade flow is to China, which bought roughly $56 billion in Brazilian farm goods in 2023, most of it soybeans crushed for animal feed and cooking oil. Cheap land, a long growing season, and heavy investment in agribusiness have turned the country into a direct competitor to the United States across several major commodities.
The Netherlands is the genuine surprise of the list. A small, densely populated country, it ranks third in the world by export value thanks to high-tech greenhouse horticulture, a powerful dairy sector, and the port of Rotterdam, which makes it a hub for processing and re-exporting food grown elsewhere. A large share of the Dutch total is therefore product that passes through the country rather than originating in it, and its figures also include non-food horticulture such as cut flowers.
The China Misconception
It is tempting to assume that China, the world’s largest food producer, must also be its largest exporter. The opposite is true. China grows more rice, wheat, and vegetables than any other nation, but it consumes nearly all of it at home and then buys still more from abroad. China is the world’s single largest food importer, taking in well over $200 billion a year, and runs a large agricultural trade deficit. It still exports around $72 billion in processed foods, seafood, and vegetables, but its central role in the global market is as a buyer, not a seller, which is exactly why Brazilian and American export totals are so sensitive to Chinese demand.
How Conflict Has Reshaped the Food Trade
No recent event has changed the food-export map more than Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Before the war, the two countries together supplied roughly a quarter of the world’s wheat exports, and Ukraine alone was a leading exporter of corn and sunflower oil. Almost all of it left through Black Sea ports, and when those ports were blockaded, Ukrainian grain exports collapsed by more than 90 percent in the spring of 2022. Global food prices climbed to a record high that March, with wheat among the hardest hit.
Relief came through two channels. The European Union opened overland “solidarity lanes” by rail, road, and the Danube River, and in July 2022 the United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which reopened the ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Pivdennyi under inspection. Over the following year, more than a thousand ships carried close to 33 million tonnes of grain and other foodstuffs out of Ukraine, about two-thirds of the wheat going to developing countries, and world prices eased. Russia withdrew from the deal in July 2023, after which Ukraine established its own protected coastal shipping corridor to keep exports moving.
The disruption did not fall evenly. Russia emerged from the war as the world’s dominant wheat exporter, reaching record volumes in the 2023 to 2024 season before adverse weather trimmed shipments to a forecast of roughly 44 million tonnes in 2025 to 2026. Other major suppliers, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, expanded their own wheat sales to fill the gap. Ukraine, by contrast, has not recovered. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate that its 2025 exports of corn, barley, and wheat were about 35 percent below their 2020 level, the result of lost farmland, damaged port infrastructure, and continued attacks on grain vessels.
The countries hit hardest were the importers. Egypt, along with much of North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of South and Southeast Asia, had relied on Russia and Ukraine for a large share of their wheat, and several nations sourced between a quarter and half of their supply from Ukraine alone. The price shock of 2022 pushed tens of millions of people toward severe hunger, a reminder that the food-export business is concentrated enough that a conflict between two suppliers can be felt at dinner tables on the other side of the planet.
A Concentrated and Vulnerable System
For all the talk of global trade, the business of feeding the world rests on a short list of countries. The United States, Brazil, and the Netherlands lead by total value; Russia now sets the price of bread through its wheat; and China’s purchases move markets in Iowa and the Brazilian interior alike. That concentration makes the system efficient in normal times and brittle in bad ones. As the events since 2022 have shown, a drought in one breadbasket or a war in another can ripple through prices everywhere, which is why the question of who exports the most food is never only an economic one.
