Selling Nigerian sesame into India.

How much Nigerian sesame does India buy?

In value terms, China, Japan and India together took about 63% of everything Nigeria exported as sesame in 2023. Looked at from the Indian side the concentration is just as sharp: in 2024 Brazil, Nigeria and Sudan supplied about 86% of India's sesame imports by value, with Brazil around 48%, Nigeria around 25% and Sudan around 13%.

India is also one of the world's largest sesame exporters. Both facts are true at once, and the reason is that a large part of what India imports is not eaten in India. It is cleaned, hulled and shipped onward as a higher-value product. India buys raw seed and sells finished seed.

For a Nigerian exporter that has a practical consequence. An Indian buyer is usually not a food brand asking for a finished, colour-sorted, retail-ready grade. It is a processor buying feedstock, and it is buying on hulling yield.

Who buys Nigerian sesame in India?

The processing sits overwhelmingly in Gujarat, and within Gujarat in the Rajkot region, with hulling and cleaning units clustered around Rajkot itself and towns such as Gondal and Dhoraji. Gujarat is both India's largest sesame-growing state and the location of most of its hulling capacity, which is why imported seed lands there rather than nearer the consuming markets.

The seaborne route follows the processing. Mundra and Kandla, on the Gujarat coast, handle the bulk of the flow, with Pipavav also in use. From Lagos this is a straightforward sailing, and a good deal shorter than the Far East routes that dominate most discussion of Nigerian sesame.

What does an Indian huller's specification need to say?

A huller is buying a yield calculation, not an appearance. Three things drive their offer:

• —Whiteness and uniformity of the seed coat, because hulled output is graded on how bright and even it comes out
• —Seed size and plumpness, because small or shrivelled seed loses disproportionately in hulling
• —Purity and admixture, because every stone, stalk and dust fraction is weight the huller paid for and cannot sell

Why do 98% and 99% purity matter for Indian buyers?

There is no commercial reason to sell a huller a sortex-finished 99.95% grade. They are about to remove the seed coat and colour-sort the result themselves, so anything you spend on optical sorting is spent twice and paid for once.

What the trade runs on instead is the screened ladder. Farm-gate sesame arrives at roughly 95 to 97% purity as received. A single screening pass takes it to about 97 to 98%. Double screening with gravity separation reaches the 98 and 99% grades, which is where Indian hulling demand sits. Purities above 99% require optical colour sorting rather than further screening, and that is a different product for a different buyer.

So the useful quotation into India is natural white at 98% purity with 2% admixture, or 99% with 1%, priced against oil content and whiteness. Quote the 99.95% sortex grade to a Rajkot huller and you will simply be out of the market on price.

What import duty applies to sesame in India?

Sesame seed enters India under HS 12074090 at a basic customs duty of 30%. On a duty-paid basis that is enough to make imported seed uncompetitive against the domestic Gujarat crop for most purposes.

The trade works because most of this seed is never meant for the Indian market. India's Advance Authorisation scheme permits duty-free import of inputs that are physically incorporated into an export product, against a matching export obligation set by Standard Input Output Norms. A huller importing Nigerian seed to hull and re-export is doing exactly what the scheme is written for.

Two things follow for the exporter. First, your Indian counterparty is often working to an export obligation with a deadline attached, which makes shipment timing genuinely commercial rather than a courtesy. Second, documentation matters more than usual, because the certificate of origin and the analysis travel with the seed into a duty-exemption file that will be audited.

Which container size suits an India sesame shipment?

Indian hulling programmes are bought in volume, and at volume the 40ft container is the right unit. Bagged sesame loads at 19 MT per 20ft FCL and 26 MT per 40ft, so a 100 MT programme is four 40ft containers against six 20ft, on fewer bills of lading and with fewer terminal handlings at both ends.

The two sizes are limited by different things, which is why the second is not double the first. A 20ft runs out of cube before it runs out of payload. A 40ft has enough cube for close to 37 MT of bagged sesame and so stops instead at the ISO payload ceiling of about 26.7 MT. Confirm the road weight limit at the destination before the packing list is fixed, since some routes cap a 40ft lower.

How we are set up for it

AgroMax runs origin operations in Nigeria and its trade desk in India, which on this particular route is less a convenience than the point. Contracts, documentation and the buyer relationship sit on Indian business hours, in the same time zone as the hullers, while the seed is being bought at the farm gate in Nasarawa, Benue and Taraba.

Send us the specification you buy against, with your destination port and the purity you need, and we will quote the screening pass that meets it rather than the one that flatters us.