July 21, 2026
Data-Driven Trade Decisions: How Agri Analytics Is Helping Exporters Navigate Tariffs, Demand Shifts, and Price Volatility
By Abdul Bari Kareem, Co-founder and CTO, T57
A few months ago, I was speaking with an exporter who runs a mid-sized basmati rice business out of Haryana. He's been in this trade for more than twenty years and has built genuinely strong relationships with buyers across the Gulf.
When the U.S. sharply raised tariffs on Indian goods in 2025 — first a reciprocal tariff, then an additional penalty tied to Russian oil purchases that together pushed duties on some Indian exports as high as 50% — his first reaction was what most exporters would probably do. He called his broker. The broker called someone else. Everyone was trying to piece together what had actually changed and what it meant for his shipments.
By the time he had a clear picture, almost two weeks had gone by.
Meanwhile, some of his competitors had already started talking to Gulf buyers who suddenly needed alternative supply arrangements. They moved quickly. Several were relying on automated policy-tracking tools that flag tariff and regulatory notifications the moment they're published, instead of waiting for the news to filter down through brokers and industry groups.
He eventually caught up, but by then the negotiations weren't really on his terms anymore.
This isn't an isolated story. I hear versions of it fairly often.
The challenge today isn't that information is unavailable. It's that interpreting it fast enough — turning a policy notification into a repriced quote or a rerouted shipment — has become the real advantage. That's exactly the gap agri analytics is built to close.
The Market Changed Faster Than Experience Could
Over the last few years, I've spent a lot of time talking with exporters, cooperatives, and aggregators across different parts of India. One sentence comes up almost every time, in some form or another:
“We've been doing this for twenty years. We know our markets.”
They're not wrong. Experience matters. Relationships matter. Those things are still incredibly valuable.
But today's market moves faster than it used to. Policies change overnight. Tariffs shift. Shipping routes get disrupted. Compliance rules evolve. Exchange rates fluctuate. None of these follow the traditional agricultural cycle anymore.
Even with all of that turbulence, India's agricultural and processed food exports touched roughly $53.2 billion in FY 2024-25 (IBEF) — growth driven largely by rice, meat, and fruit shipments. That tells us something. Exporters who adapted quickly still managed to grow. Those who waited for complete certainty often found themselves reacting instead of leading.
Earlier, disruptions usually had familiar causes, such as - weak monsoon or port congestion or an unexpected export restriction.
Difficult, but at least people knew what they were dealing with — and, increasingly, satellite crop-health imagery, rainfall data, and soil-moisture indices give exporters a reasonable read on a coming shortfall or surplus months before harvest.
Now, a lot of the biggest disruptions come from policy decisions instead. A tariff announcement. A new regulation. A bilateral trade agreement. A sudden currency movement. These don't wait for harvest season — they happen whenever governments decide they should. That's precisely why the analytics layer has to run continuously rather than seasonally.
Why India's Middle East and Southeast Asia Trade Corridors Matter So Much?
At T57, a large part of our work focuses on two corridors: India to the Middle East, and India to Southeast Asia.
These markets matter enormously for Indian exporters, especially in rice, spices, pulses, and other food commodities. GCC countries depend heavily on imported food, and for nations like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman, food security sits close to the top of the national agenda. India has become one of their most trusted suppliers — that's a real opportunity, but it also means buyers expect reliability. When shipping routes get disrupted or export policies suddenly shift, Gulf buyers feel it almost immediately.
Many exporters still remember what happened when India banned exports of non-basmati white rice in July 2023 to protect domestic supply, only easing that ban a year later once surplus stocks built up (Business Standard; IFPRI). That single restriction, together with the parallel ban on broken rice, had covered close to 45% of India's total rice exports the year before — buyers scrambled to find alternatives almost overnight, and mills in states like West Bengal shut down for months waiting it out. Exporters who had visibility into stock-to-use ratios and government procurement data going into that period had a much better sense of how long the restriction was likely to hold, and priced their contracts accordingly.
Southeast Asia is slightly different. Those markets are highly price-sensitive. Even small changes in tariffs, quality standards, or freight costs can influence buying decisions. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam don't wait around for exporters to figure things out — if another supplier becomes even marginally more competitive, buyers move. In corridors like this, a live view of freight indices, competitor pricing, and landed-cost calculations often matters more than any single relationship.
So What Does “Data-Driven Trade” Actually Mean?
This phrase gets thrown around a lot. For me, it isn't about dashboards or complicated charts for their own sake. It's simpler than that — it's a handful of analytics capabilities working together in the background.
Second, it's about seeing where demand is moving. Demand rarely disappears — it usually shifts somewhere else. If one market becomes expensive or restricted, buyers start looking elsewhere. Exporters who spot those movements early, through demand-sensing signals rather than gut feel, get the first opportunity to start those conversations. Sometimes that's all the advantage they need.
Third, compliance shouldn't feel like a last-minute scramble. A surprising number of shipment issues still trace back to paperwork — certificates, testing reports, registrations, export documentation. When all of this is managed manually, mistakes happen, especially under time pressure. When compliance becomes part of the transaction itself instead of an afterthought, buyers naturally gain more confidence.
What We're Trying to Solve at T57
We didn't build T57 because agriculture needed another technology platform for its own sake. We built it because we kept running into the same problem, again and again: the information exporters needed already existed — it just wasn't connected.
Shipment history sat in one place. Pricing benchmarks sat somewhere else. Buyer credibility depended mostly on personal networks. Government websites carried important policy updates, but finding the relevant one wasn't easy. In some cases, important documents were still being couriered.
That's the gap we're trying to close with an analytics layer underneath the platform: policy and regulatory tracking that reads and classifies government notifications automatically, price and freight models trained on historical trade data, and buyer-scoring logic built from transaction history and documentation records rather than word of mouth alone. None of this replaces an exporter's judgment — it just gives that judgment better inputs to work with.
Our goal isn't to replace an exporter's experience or relationships — those will always matter. We're trying to make sure every decision is backed by current, connected, reliable information instead of fragments scattered across a dozen systems.
Final Thoughts
Every disruption creates two things: a challenge, and an opportunity. When one exporter reacts late, another exporter who spotted the signals earlier often wins that business. We've watched this play out repeatedly over the past couple of years, across both the Gulf and Southeast Asian markets.
The exporters who succeed over the next decade probably won't just be the biggest companies. They'll be the ones who can adjust pricing faster, reroute shipments quicker, and start conversations with buyers before everyone else does — because their analytics caught the signal early.
In today's market, speed has become one of the biggest competitive advantages. Good relationships will always matter. But increasingly, those relationships need to be backed by better data.
That's where the next edge in Indian agri-trade will come from.
References
1. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). Indian Agriculture Sector, Farming in India — FY25 agri and processed food exports at $53.24 billion. https://www.ibef.org/industry/agriculture-india
2. American Kahani. The Basmati Battle: Trump's Rice Tariff Threat Exposes Complex Reality of India-U.S. Agricultural Trade — 2025 U.S. tariff escalation on Indian goods, including rice. https://americankahani.com/business/the-basmati-battle-trumps-rice-tariff-threat-exposes-complex-reality-of-india-u-s-agricultural-trade/
3. Business Standard. Bengal exporters get relief as Centre lifts ban on non-basmati white rice — background on the July 2023 export ban and its September 2024 removal. https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/bengal-exporters-get-relief-as-centre-lifts-ban-on-non-basmati-white-rice-124092800699_1.html
4. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). India lifts export restrictions on rice — detailed timeline and trade-volume impact of India's 2022–2024 rice export restrictions. https://www.ifpri.org/blog/india-lifts-export-restrictions-on-rice/
5. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. India: India Bans the Export of Non-Basmati White Rice — official notification details (DGFT Notification No. 20/2023). https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/india-india-bans-export-non-basmati-white-rice
When the U.S. sharply raised tariffs on Indian goods in 2025 — first a reciprocal tariff, then an additional penalty tied to Russian oil purchases that together pushed duties on some Indian exports as high as 50% — his first reaction was what most exporters would probably do. He called his broker. The broker called someone else. Everyone was trying to piece together what had actually changed and what it meant for his shipments.
By the time he had a clear picture, almost two weeks had gone by.
Meanwhile, some of his competitors had already started talking to Gulf buyers who suddenly needed alternative supply arrangements. They moved quickly. Several were relying on automated policy-tracking tools that flag tariff and regulatory notifications the moment they're published, instead of waiting for the news to filter down through brokers and industry groups.
He eventually caught up, but by then the negotiations weren't really on his terms anymore.
This isn't an isolated story. I hear versions of it fairly often.
The challenge today isn't that information is unavailable. It's that interpreting it fast enough — turning a policy notification into a repriced quote or a rerouted shipment — has become the real advantage. That's exactly the gap agri analytics is built to close.
The Market Changed Faster Than Experience Could
Over the last few years, I've spent a lot of time talking with exporters, cooperatives, and aggregators across different parts of India. One sentence comes up almost every time, in some form or another:
“We've been doing this for twenty years. We know our markets.”
They're not wrong. Experience matters. Relationships matter. Those things are still incredibly valuable.
But today's market moves faster than it used to. Policies change overnight. Tariffs shift. Shipping routes get disrupted. Compliance rules evolve. Exchange rates fluctuate. None of these follow the traditional agricultural cycle anymore.
Even with all of that turbulence, India's agricultural and processed food exports touched roughly $53.2 billion in FY 2024-25 (IBEF) — growth driven largely by rice, meat, and fruit shipments. That tells us something. Exporters who adapted quickly still managed to grow. Those who waited for complete certainty often found themselves reacting instead of leading.
Earlier, disruptions usually had familiar causes, such as - weak monsoon or port congestion or an unexpected export restriction.
Difficult, but at least people knew what they were dealing with — and, increasingly, satellite crop-health imagery, rainfall data, and soil-moisture indices give exporters a reasonable read on a coming shortfall or surplus months before harvest.
Now, a lot of the biggest disruptions come from policy decisions instead. A tariff announcement. A new regulation. A bilateral trade agreement. A sudden currency movement. These don't wait for harvest season — they happen whenever governments decide they should. That's precisely why the analytics layer has to run continuously rather than seasonally.
Why India's Middle East and Southeast Asia Trade Corridors Matter So Much?
At T57, a large part of our work focuses on two corridors: India to the Middle East, and India to Southeast Asia.
These markets matter enormously for Indian exporters, especially in rice, spices, pulses, and other food commodities. GCC countries depend heavily on imported food, and for nations like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman, food security sits close to the top of the national agenda. India has become one of their most trusted suppliers — that's a real opportunity, but it also means buyers expect reliability. When shipping routes get disrupted or export policies suddenly shift, Gulf buyers feel it almost immediately.
Many exporters still remember what happened when India banned exports of non-basmati white rice in July 2023 to protect domestic supply, only easing that ban a year later once surplus stocks built up (Business Standard; IFPRI). That single restriction, together with the parallel ban on broken rice, had covered close to 45% of India's total rice exports the year before — buyers scrambled to find alternatives almost overnight, and mills in states like West Bengal shut down for months waiting it out. Exporters who had visibility into stock-to-use ratios and government procurement data going into that period had a much better sense of how long the restriction was likely to hold, and priced their contracts accordingly.
Southeast Asia is slightly different. Those markets are highly price-sensitive. Even small changes in tariffs, quality standards, or freight costs can influence buying decisions. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam don't wait around for exporters to figure things out — if another supplier becomes even marginally more competitive, buyers move. In corridors like this, a live view of freight indices, competitor pricing, and landed-cost calculations often matters more than any single relationship.
So What Does “Data-Driven Trade” Actually Mean?
This phrase gets thrown around a lot. For me, it isn't about dashboards or complicated charts for their own sake. It's simpler than that — it's a handful of analytics capabilities working together in the background.
- Regulatory and policy monitoring: software that continuously scans government trade portals, customs notifications, and quality-standard updates and flags anything relevant before a buyer or a broker calls to ask about it.
- Demand-sensing models: tracking import volumes, buyer inquiry patterns, and price movements across markets to spot where demand is migrating, rather than waiting for it to show up as a lost order.
- Supply and yield forecasting: combining satellite imagery, weather data, and mandi arrival records to estimate upcoming harvest volumes and price direction ahead of the market.
- Price and freight modeling: benchmarking current export prices and shipping costs against historical patterns so a quote reflects where the market is actually heading, not just where it was last week.
- Compliance automation: digitizing certificates, testing reports, and registrations so paperwork moves with the shipment instead of trailing behind it.
Second, it's about seeing where demand is moving. Demand rarely disappears — it usually shifts somewhere else. If one market becomes expensive or restricted, buyers start looking elsewhere. Exporters who spot those movements early, through demand-sensing signals rather than gut feel, get the first opportunity to start those conversations. Sometimes that's all the advantage they need.
Third, compliance shouldn't feel like a last-minute scramble. A surprising number of shipment issues still trace back to paperwork — certificates, testing reports, registrations, export documentation. When all of this is managed manually, mistakes happen, especially under time pressure. When compliance becomes part of the transaction itself instead of an afterthought, buyers naturally gain more confidence.
What We're Trying to Solve at T57
We didn't build T57 because agriculture needed another technology platform for its own sake. We built it because we kept running into the same problem, again and again: the information exporters needed already existed — it just wasn't connected.
Shipment history sat in one place. Pricing benchmarks sat somewhere else. Buyer credibility depended mostly on personal networks. Government websites carried important policy updates, but finding the relevant one wasn't easy. In some cases, important documents were still being couriered.
That's the gap we're trying to close with an analytics layer underneath the platform: policy and regulatory tracking that reads and classifies government notifications automatically, price and freight models trained on historical trade data, and buyer-scoring logic built from transaction history and documentation records rather than word of mouth alone. None of this replaces an exporter's judgment — it just gives that judgment better inputs to work with.
Our goal isn't to replace an exporter's experience or relationships — those will always matter. We're trying to make sure every decision is backed by current, connected, reliable information instead of fragments scattered across a dozen systems.
Final Thoughts
Every disruption creates two things: a challenge, and an opportunity. When one exporter reacts late, another exporter who spotted the signals earlier often wins that business. We've watched this play out repeatedly over the past couple of years, across both the Gulf and Southeast Asian markets.
The exporters who succeed over the next decade probably won't just be the biggest companies. They'll be the ones who can adjust pricing faster, reroute shipments quicker, and start conversations with buyers before everyone else does — because their analytics caught the signal early.
In today's market, speed has become one of the biggest competitive advantages. Good relationships will always matter. But increasingly, those relationships need to be backed by better data.
That's where the next edge in Indian agri-trade will come from.
References
1. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). Indian Agriculture Sector, Farming in India — FY25 agri and processed food exports at $53.24 billion. https://www.ibef.org/industry/agriculture-india
2. American Kahani. The Basmati Battle: Trump's Rice Tariff Threat Exposes Complex Reality of India-U.S. Agricultural Trade — 2025 U.S. tariff escalation on Indian goods, including rice. https://americankahani.com/business/the-basmati-battle-trumps-rice-tariff-threat-exposes-complex-reality-of-india-u-s-agricultural-trade/
3. Business Standard. Bengal exporters get relief as Centre lifts ban on non-basmati white rice — background on the July 2023 export ban and its September 2024 removal. https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/bengal-exporters-get-relief-as-centre-lifts-ban-on-non-basmati-white-rice-124092800699_1.html
4. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). India lifts export restrictions on rice — detailed timeline and trade-volume impact of India's 2022–2024 rice export restrictions. https://www.ifpri.org/blog/india-lifts-export-restrictions-on-rice/
5. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. India: India Bans the Export of Non-Basmati White Rice — official notification details (DGFT Notification No. 20/2023). https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/india-india-bans-export-non-basmati-white-rice
