Colombia's 2025 Soybean Grain Imports Jump 34 Per Cent as Buyers Shift from Meal to Beans, Pheonix Models USD 1.31 Billion Market by 2033

October 2026 — Colombia imported 34 per cent more soybean grain in 2025 than it did in 2024. Pheonix Research puts that import pool at 1,420 thousand tonnes and USD 632 million for the year and models it reaching 2,760 thousand tonnes and USD 1.31 billion by 2033 — a volume CAGR of 8.7 per cent and a value CAGR of 9.5 per cent — in a market report published today, Colombia Soybean Grain Market Size, Share & Forecast 2026–2033.

The report’s central finding is that the 34 per cent is not a restocking cycle. It is a share shift.

Restocking would have looked different

A restocking buyer adds tonnes because supply is long and prices are weak. Volume rises; revenue per tonne falls. Colombia’s pool did not behave that way. Pheonix puts 2025 revenue per tonne at USD 445, rising to USD 475 by 2033 — plus 6.6 per cent across the whole window, about 0.8 per cent a year. Of the 9.5 per cent value CAGR, volume contributes 8.7 points and price 0.8.

What moved instead was the composition of the purchase. Colombia is shifting from importing soybean meal to importing whole beans and extracting the oil at home, because the oil leg is where the crush margin has been made since biofuel demand reset the economics of the soybean complex. Whole beans carry the oil. Meal does not.

The oil leg, priced

How much that leg is worth is the most leveraged assumption in the forecast, and the report states it directly. At a crush yield of 78 per cent meal, 18 per cent crude oil and 4 per cent hulls and loss, oil’s share of crush revenue is 18.8 per cent when soybean oil and meal trade at parity, 31.6 per cent at two to one, 36.6 per cent at two and a half, and 40.9 per cent at three to one.

The substitution thesis does not require oil to be unusually expensive. It requires the oil leg to keep covering the extra freight, working capital and processing cost of importing a bean rather than a meal. The moment it stops, imported meal wins again on working capital and the 34 per cent reverses with no change whatsoever in Colombian demand.

Four segmentation cuts decide who wins

All shares are Pheonix estimates against the 1,420 thousand tonne 2025 pool.

• By end use: poultry feed 46 per cent (653.2 thousand tonnes), swine feed 21 per cent (298.2), edible oils and food-industrial refining 17 per cent (241.4), dairy and beef feed 9 per cent (127.8), aquafeed 7 per cent (99.4).
• By origin: United States 34 per cent, Brazil 29 per cent, Argentina 17 per cent, Paraguay 13 per cent, Bolivia and others 7 per cent.
• By port of entry: Buenaventura 41 per cent, Cartagena 23 per cent, Barranquilla 19 per cent, Santa Marta 9 per cent, river and inland routes 8 per cent.
• By buyer: integrated protein producers 38 per cent (539.6 thousand tonnes), independent mills 31 per cent (440.2), crushers and refiners 21 per cent (298.2), traders 10 per cent (142.0).

The buy-side split carries the argument. Only crushers and refiners — a fifth of the pool — are structurally long the oil leg. Everyone else is buying protein and would rather not carry a bean they cannot extract from. That asymmetry, rather than brand or price, is why toll-crush arrangements and least-cost formulation decide more in this market than anything a supplier controls.

The constraint is crush capacity, and it arrives in lumps

A single two-thousand-tonne-a-day plant is 660 thousand tonnes a year: 46 per cent of the entire 2025 pool and 24 per cent of the 2033 one. The whole 2033 pool supports only 4.2 plants at that scale, so three or four separate commitments — each taken by a different board, none of which sees the others’ business case — would be enough to strand the investment.

The report prices both paths. At the parent feed industry’s own growth rate, with no further shift from meal to beans, the pool still reaches USD 864.9 million by 2033. At an accelerated build-out it reaches USD 1,621.6 million. The USD 757 million between those outcomes is decided by refinery and crush utilisation in the Cauca valley and around Cartagena, and by whether port and silo capacity at Buenaventura clears fast enough to keep imported beans cheaper than imported meal.

Value created across the window is USD 678 million for 1,340 thousand tonnes added — USD 506 per tonne of new volume. The report is explicit that this is not a margin: it is close to the landed value of a tonne of beans (USD 445) plus the price gain, which means an added tonne largely pays for itself in pool value. What a processor captures is the crush spread on that tonne, not the tonne — and the spread is set by an oil-to-meal ratio Colombia does not control.

What would falsify the forecast

Two conditions, both monitorable quarterly. First, if Colombia’s imported bean volumes fall back toward 1,060 thousand tonnes while meal imports hold, the share-shift thesis is dead and the market is a feed-growth story at 4 per cent, not 8.7. Second, if deforestation-free sourcing requirements on South American soy raise the delivered cost of Brazilian and Paraguayan beans relative to US beans by more than the oil leg is worth, the substitution reverses without any change in Colombian demand.

Sensitivities, ranked: one percentage point off the growth rate is USD 96.2 million of 2033 value; a 2025 pool 15 per cent lower than modelled, 1,200 rather than 1,420 thousand tonnes, is USD 202.9 million; one point of tariff or one point of storage shrink is USD 6.3 million each; and plus or minus 1 per cent on either volume or price at 2033 is USD 13.1 million. Price is the least consequential variable in the model.

Basis of estimate

Two figures in the report are anchored on reported data: the 34 per cent increase in 2025 imports, and the 1,060 thousand tonne 2024 base that follows from dividing the 2025 pool by 1.34. The absolute base values, the segmentation shares and the scenario band are Pheonix modelled estimates, internally consistent and directional, not customs statistics. They are labelled as such in the body of the report. Re-basing against a DANE or DIAN import figure would change the level without changing the mechanism.

Related Pheonix research

The Colombian pool sits inside a wider regional and global feed complex. See Latin America Animal Feed Market 2026–2033, Global Animal Feed Market 2026–2033, Global Sunflower Seeds Market 2026–2033 for the competing oilseed, and Global Feed Phosphates Market 2026–2033 for the inclusion-rate side of the formulation decision.

About Pheonix Research

Pheonix Research publishes market intelligence on industrial, food and agricultural value chains, built from primary trade and capacity evidence rather than consensus estimates. The full report, including segmentation tables, the crush-capacity scenario band and the falsifiers, is available at pheonixresearch.com.