Pulses & Legumes

Pulses are the most established Canadian food export into Southeast Asia, and the trade is mature enough that buyers rarely need convincing about the origin. What still goes wrong is further down: classification, specification drift between samples and containers, and the assumption that a product moving freely into one ASEAN market moves the same way into the next.

The crop is concentrated in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, harvested once a year, and moves through a cleaning and grading chain before it is containerised. That has two consequences for a buyer. Availability and price are seasonal against a single harvest rather than a rolling supply, so contracting behaviour differs from a manufactured good. And because grading is a real step rather than a formality, the specification you agree (size, colour, moisture, foreign material, split tolerance) determines what actually arrives more than the category name does.

For a Canadian exporter, the pulse trade is unusual in that the product itself is rarely the obstacle. The obstacles are documentary: the tariff line the product falls under in the destination, whether the destination treats it as a food requiring registration or a commodity requiring only phytosanitary clearance, and whether your establishment holds the certification the importing authority asks for at entry. Those answers differ across the six markets on this site, and they differ by product within the category.

Each sub-category below carries its classification and the per-market duty and registration position, each cited to the source it came from and dated. Where a value has not been verified it is shown as available on request rather than estimated: send us the specification and destination and we will confirm it.