Rice (Dhaan) in Nepal: Production, Yield and the Rice Import Bill

Rice — dhaan as unmilled paddy, chamal once milled — is Nepal's single most important crop by area, production and dietary weight. It occupies roughly 1.4 million hectares, more than any other crop, and is the largest single contributor to agricultural gross domestic product (AGDP): estimates put its share at roughly 13–20 percent of AGDP and around 4–7 percent of national GDP depending on the year and method. Nepalis eat about 137–138 kilograms of milled rice per person per year, one of the higher rates in the world, and rice accounts for more than half of total cereal consumption.

The Tarai plains — Nepal's granary — hold roughly two-thirds to 70 percent of the rice area, the mid-hills grow most of the rest, and a sliver survives in high valleys such as Jumla, home to some of the world's highest-altitude rice fields. Because the crop matters so much, the start of transplanting is a national event: Asar 15 (29 June) has been observed as National Paddy Day (Rastriya Dhan Diwas) since 2005 (2062 BS), celebrated with mud-splashed transplanting and dahi-chiura (curd and beaten rice). And because most fields are rain-fed, Nepal's GDP growth forecasts routinely hinge on how the monsoon treats the paddy crop, while food inflation tracks the harvest and the price of imported Indian rice.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MOALD), Nepal harvested a record 5.95 million tonnes of paddy in fiscal year 2024/25 (2081/82 BS), up 4.04 percent on the previous year's 5.72 million tonnes and above the earlier record of 5.62 million tonnes set in 2020/21. The crop was planted on about 1.42 million hectares, giving a record average yield of 4.19 tonnes per hectare. MOALD credited a timely, above-normal monsoon — 1,691 mm of rain over 112 days, about 16 percent above average — that spared the main Tarai rice belt even as late-September 2024 floods caused heavy damage elsewhere.

Provincial data show where the grain comes from: in FY 2024/25 Madhesh produced about 1.48 million tonnes, Koshi about 1.47 million and Lumbini about 1.36 million, while Karnali, the smallest producer, grew about 130,000 tonnes. The record was short-lived. For the FY 2025/26 (2082/83 BS) crop, a mid-monsoon dry spell delayed transplanting and unseasonal rain, hail and waterlogging in late October 2025 destroyed harvested paddy drying in the fields; MOALD projected output to fall roughly 5–7 percent, or around 300,000 tonnes.

The longer trend is production growth on a shrinking footprint. A 2024 peer-reviewed study in Plant-Environment Interactions found that between 2011 and 2021 Nepal's rice area fell from 1,531,493 hectares to 1,477,378 hectares (about 0.81 percent a year), while yields rose about 1.97 percent a year and production about 1.5 percent a year — meaning better yields, not more land, kept the rice coming.

Nepali farmers grow rice in two main seasons. Barkhe dhaan, the main monsoon crop, dominates: roughly 92 percent of the rice area is transplanted around Asar–Saun (June–July) and harvested in Kartik–Mangsir (October–November). Mostly rain-fed, the Barkhe crop is hostage to the monsoon — a late onset, a mid-season dry spell or unseasonal harvest-time rain can each shave hundreds of thousands of tonnes off output, as in October 2021 and October–November 2025.

Chaite dhaan, spring rice, covers only around 7 percent of the rice area — about 104,700 hectares in FY 2024/25 — sown in Chait (February–March) and harvested in June–July before the main season begins. Grown mostly on irrigated Tarai land, Chaite paddy typically out-yields the main crop, at around 4 tonnes per hectare or more, because irrigation, sunshine and fertiliser timing are easier to control; a residual area under 1 percent grows winter (boro-type) rice. Because spring rice does not depend on the monsoon, MOALD and donor projects promote it — including among flood-prone Tarai farmers — as the fastest way to add domestic supply without new land.

The land planted to rice has been sliding for over a decade, from about 1.53 million hectares in 2011 to about 1.48 million in 2021, with recent MOALD estimates near 1.42 million hectares. The 2024 study and repeated MOALD statements point to the same cluster of causes: conversion of farmland to housing plots and roads (in the Tarai, cultivated land shrank by roughly 250 square kilometres between 1989 and 2016 as towns spread over fertile fields), 'plotting' of paddy land for real estate, and an acute farm-labour shortage as young workers migrate abroad for remittance work.

Economics reinforces the shift. Holdings are fragmented, mechanisation is limited, chemical fertiliser frequently runs short at transplanting time, and margins are thin, so marginal fields — especially unirrigated hill terraces — are abandoned or switched to other uses; paddy areas in Karnali districts, for example, have shrunk as disease and poor irrigation take a toll. The paradox of recent years — record production on shrinking land — cannot continue indefinitely: once yield gains slow, a smaller area means a bigger structural deficit.

Nepal's average paddy yield has historically hovered around 3.4–3.8 tonnes per hectare, reaching a record 4.19 tonnes in the exceptional 2024/25 season. That puts Nepal roughly on par with India and Pakistan (about 3.5–4 tonnes per hectare in comparable series) but clearly behind Bangladesh, at about 4.4–4.8 tonnes, and far behind China at roughly 7 tonnes. The gap with Bangladesh — a country with similar smallholder agriculture — is the benchmark Nepali agronomists cite most, since it shows what irrigation, modern varieties and intensive extension can achieve in the same region.

The deeper problem is the pace of improvement: between 1960 and 2017, Nepal's rice yield grew only about 1.14 percent a year, versus roughly 2.5 percent in India and 3 percent in Bangladesh. Researchers blame overwhelmingly rain-fed cultivation, slow replacement of old seed varieties, fertiliser bottlenecks during peak transplanting, and minimal mechanisation on fragmented plots. Closing even half the yield gap with Bangladesh would, on Nepal's current area, add well over a million tonnes of paddy a year — more than the country's entire import volume in most years.

Despite record harvests, Nepal is a structural rice importer. Department of Customs data show paddy and rice imports worth about Rs 43.4 billion in FY 2024/25 (2081/82 BS) — roughly Rs 20.4 billion of paddy, Rs 10.6 billion of basmati and Rs 12.5 billion of other rice — within a total food import bill of about Rs 360 billion. Imports had dipped to around Rs 21–22 billion in FY 2023/24, when Indian export curbs choked supply, and peaked near Rs 79 billion in FY 2021/22 (2078/79 BS), when Nepal bought a record 1.4 million tonnes of rice from India.

Why does a rice-growing country import so much? First, demand outruns supply: Nepal needs roughly 4 million tonnes of milled rice a year, and even the record 5.95-million-tonne paddy crop yields only about that much after milling, leaving no cushion in weaker years. The 2024 food-security study found the self-sufficiency ratio fell from 92.72 percent in 2011/12 to 82.01 percent in 2021/22, with import dependency rising from about 7 to 18 percent. Second, urban tastes have shifted toward fine and basmati rice that Nepal barely grows, so those imports continue even in bumper years while Nepal exports almost nothing. Third, India's heavy farm subsidies make Indian rice cheaper than the Nepali crop, so the open border pulls in grain — legally and, when price gaps widen, through smuggling.

Because virtually all imported rice and paddy comes from India, Indian trade policy is effectively Nepali food policy. When India banned exports of non-basmati white rice on 20 July 2023 to protect its own reserves, rice prices in Nepal jumped by Rs 200–250 per 25-kilogram bag within a week — even though traders held ample stock. Nepal then had to negotiate a special quota: in October–December 2023, India approved 95,000 tonnes of non-basmati white rice for Nepal, split between state corporations (30,000 tonnes) and private importers (65,000 tonnes).

India began unwinding the curbs on 27 September 2024, replacing the ban with a minimum export price of US$490 per tonne and cutting the parboiled-rice duty from 20 to 10 percent, then scrapped the floor price and remaining export taxes on 23 October 2024 after a bumper Indian harvest. Nepali retail prices, however, fell only slowly — premium jeera masino rice dropped just Rs 100 per bag against a rise of Rs 800–900 since 2023 — a ratchet effect in which Indian curbs push Nepali prices up fast but their removal brings them down slowly. The episode is now the standard cautionary tale in Nepal's food-security debate: one supplier's domestic politics can reprice the national staple overnight.

Nepal was a net exporter of rice until the early 1980s, when Tarai grain moved south in large volumes; it has been a net cereal importer since. Reversing four decades of drift is the stated goal of successive governments, and the toolkit is well known: expand irrigation so paddy is not monsoon-hostage, push higher-yielding and stress-tolerant varieties, scale up Chaite (spring) rice, guarantee fertiliser supply before Asar, and protect paddy land from plotting. The Prime Minister Agriculture Modernisation Project has designated rice 'super zones' in the Tarai for exactly this purpose.

Price policy is also becoming more farmer-friendly: the government now sets the paddy minimum support price before transplanting rather than after harvest — for the 2025/26 crop, announced 11 August 2025, Rs 3,628.33 per quintal for common paddy and Rs 3,463.81 for coarse (mota) paddy, up 1.33–1.56 percent — though procurement capacity remains thin. The arithmetic is not hopeless: yields are rising about 2 percent a year, and matching Bangladeshi productivity on today's area would broadly cover national demand. But with paddy land shrinking, labour leaving and tastes shifting to fine rice Nepal barely grows, most analysts expect the import bill — and the exposure to Indian export policy — to persist well into the 2030s unless investment in irrigation and seeds accelerates sharply.