Ginger Price in Nepal: How Export Prices Get Published

Search for a ginger price in Nepal, or a ginger price per kg, and you will get numbers. Plenty of them. What you will rarely get is a number with a date and a named source attached. This page will not hand you a figure, and the reason is narrower than "there is no data on Nepali ginger": the official record does cover ginger, but it covers area, production and export value. A dated per-kilogram ginger price, published on a schedule, does not exist in that record. That gap is what this article explains.

If a per-kg figure is what you need, the section near the end on where to get a local number is the part to read first. The rest of the page is about why the numbers you find online so often describe nothing.

What the official record actually holds

Three sources do most of the work here, and each has a name, an owner and a release rhythm.

Department of Customs. Nepal's customs authority publishes foreign trade statistics, with export quantity and value broken out by commodity line. It releases figures monthly and then consolidates them annually. Both releases arrive after the period they describe has closed, and the annual tables land later still. Customs data is a record of declarations filed at the border, not a record of what anyone was paid upcountry.

Trade and Export Promotion Centre (TEPC). TEPC compiles export and import statistics from customs declarations and publishes them as trade tables. If you want a ginger export value for a given fiscal year, this and the customs release are where that figure comes from. TEPC updates on its own reporting cycle, so a new figure appears when the compilation is done, not when a truck leaves Ilam or Salyan.

Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MoALD), Statistical Information on Nepalese Agriculture. The annual yearbook carries ginger area, production and productivity, generally down to district level. It is the best public picture of how much ginger Nepal grows and where. It appears after the fiscal year it covers has ended, which means the newest edition available is always describing a season already finished. It also has no price column for ginger.

So the yearbook exists. The customs commodity tables exist. Anyone who tells you Nepal publishes no ginger data at all is wrong, and anyone who tells you those tables give you a rate per kilo is also wrong. Scroll them looking for "price per kg of ginger" and you come up empty, because that column was never built.

Why a live daily ginger rate does not exist

Ginger in Nepal moves in loose lots, negotiated between a grower or a local collector and a trader. There is no exchange, no spot board, no settlement price published each evening. What exists instead is paperwork: customs declarations filed when a consignment crosses a border, and annual survey data compiled well after the season ends. Those are administrative by-products, and they arrive late by design.

Three different numbers that all get called "the price"

Farmgate is what leaves the grower's hands. Usually fresh, often ungraded, sometimes sold standing in the field before it is lifted.

Trader or mandi quotes add collection, cleaning, bagging, transport and the trader's margin. They move fast, and they move locally. Two collection centres an hour apart can quote differently on the same day.

Customs-derived unit value is a national average, computed after the fact, from declared export value divided by declared quantity.

Average those three together and you get a number that describes none of them. They are kept apart on this page, and they should be kept apart anywhere you see them.

How an export unit value is actually built

Take the declared value of a ginger consignment, divide by the declared quantity, and you have a unit value for that period. Simple arithmetic, awkward interpretation.

The line the ginger sits in matters more than most price pages admit. At the six-digit level of the international tariff, heading 0910 splits ginger into "neither crushed nor ground" and "crushed or ground." Fresh and dried ginger sit together in that first line. Whether Nepal's eight-digit national lines separate fresh from dried is something we could not confirm against a citable tariff schedule at the time of writing, so treat any claim that fresh and dried ginger carry officially separate unit values as unverified until you have the line numbers in front of you. Depending on how the national line is drawn, mixing them can flatten exactly the difference the numbers were meant to show.

A unit value also carries a quality mix, whatever freight terms were declared, any re-export passing through, and the destination mix, since buyers in different markets pay differently. None of that is a farmgate price. The size of the gap between the two is the interesting part. It is not an error to be smoothed away.

What sutho is, and why dry kilos are not fresh kilos

Sutho is dried ginger: the rhizome cured and dried, sold by dry weight rather than fresh off the field. Drying drives off water, so a dried ginger price and a fresh ginger price describe different quantities of the same crop. The fresh-to-dry ratio depends on the rhizome's starting moisture and on how it was cured, and any single conversion factor is a rule of thumb at best. If a buyer quotes you on sutho, ask what moisture they are assuming. If they cannot say, the price is not comparable to anything.

Hill and Terai do not come to harvest together

Ginger is grown across both the mid-hills and the plains, and the two zones do not finish at the same time. That shifts when curing can start and how long a drying window a household actually gets, and it means a national "harvest price" is an average across weeks and altitudes, not a moment. For timing in your own area, your district agriculture office or agriculture knowledge centre is the right place to ask. They will know the local calendar better than any national table.

Grading is more buyer-specific than most price pages admit

Moisture targets, size bands, colour and cleanliness expectations come from the buyer, and they vary enough that presenting any of them as a trade norm would mislead. Ask for the specification sheet in writing, dated, before you agree a consignment. Anything you read online without a named buyer or standard attached deserves to be treated as unverified, including figures on this site if they ever appear without a date.

Where to get a local number instead

Online is the wrong place to look for today's farmgate ginger price. These are the places that can actually give you something usable.

Your district agriculture office or agriculture knowledge centre. They track local planting, harvest and often local market rates, and some keep weekly price notices. Visit or call; a phone number and a named officer beats a blog post every time.

The collection centre or cooperative you would sell through. Ask what they paid this week, for what grade, in what condition. Ask for two or three examples rather than one. A price without a grade attached is half a price.

Kalimati Fruits and Vegetables Market Development Board. This Kathmandu wholesale market publishes price lists for produce, and ginger appears on them where it is traded. It is a genuine, dated, reasonably frequent source, with one big caveat: it is a Kathmandu wholesale price, not a hill farmgate price and not an export parity price. Use it for trend, not for what your neighbour will be offered in Dhading.

Your buyer. Get the specification in writing, with the moisture basis stated, before the consignment is agreed. That document is worth more than any rate you will find by searching.

Customs and TEPC releases. For export value and volume, and for comparing one year against another, these remain the reference. Just be clear that you are reading a national annual average, months after the season closed.

Related reading

For the same method applied to other crops, see our guide to cardamom prices in Nepal and the explainer on reading Nepal's export unit values.

Sources last opened and checked: 1 November 2026. Scheduled recheck: November 2027. This page will be updated sooner if a dated customs commodity release with a ginger line, or a new MoALD yearbook edition, is located and can be cited, or if the eight-digit tariff lines for fresh and dried ginger can be confirmed.