Incoterms and Brazilian export ports: choosing a delivery basis and a port

The short answer

A delivery basis under the Incoterms rules divides costs and control between seller and buyer. It does not, on its own, tell you a market price. On the three maritime rules a commodity buyer meets most often, the split is straightforward: under FOB the buyer arranges and pays for the main ocean carriage, and under CFR and CIF the seller does. Under CIF the seller also insures the cargo, but only at the minimum level.

For cargo that moves in containers rather than in bulk, the ICC's own guidance points away from FOB and toward FCA. That matters for chilled meat and hides, which travel in containers, not for soy or corn, which move in bulk.

Port choice follows the commodity and the inland logistics behind it. Santos and Paranaguá dominate the southern soy, sugar and coffee flows; the northern Arco Norte route through Itaqui shortens the inland haul for grain grown in the centre and north. The further a farm sits from its loading port, the more of that distance ends up inside an FOB price.

Incoterms for a commodity deal, read as costs

The current edition is Incoterms 2020, in force since 1 January 2020, ICC publication 723E. There are eleven rules, and four of them, FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF, are written only for sea and inland waterway transport. All the costs attached to a rule are collected in one place, article A9/B9. A revision toward Incoterms 2030 has been announced in the ICC's 2026 workplan, but no text of it exists yet, so anything sold to you as "Incoterms 2030" today is describing something that has not been published.

Three of the maritime rules cover almost all first-time commodity purchases. Read strictly by cost, they differ like this.

Rule	Who arranges and pays the main ocean freight	Cargo insurance
FOB, Free On Board	Buyer. The seller delivers to the port of shipment; the buyer contracts and pays for the sea carriage	Not required of either side by the rule
CFR, Cost and Freight	Seller pays for the main ocean carriage to the destination port	Not required by the rule
CIF, Cost, Insurance and Freight	Seller pays for the main ocean carriage	Seller must insure, and by default only at Institute Cargo Clauses (C), the minimum level

The practical reading is short. Under FOB the buyer controls the ocean leg, which means the buyer picks the carrier, the vessel and the sailing. Under CFR and CIF the seller controls it. Under CIF the seller also buys insurance, but the default is Clauses (C), the narrowest cover. A buyer who wants broad protection on the cargo will often find the CIF default too thin and arrange its own policy regardless. CIP, by contrast, carries the higher Clauses (A) cover, but CIP is not a maritime rule.

One thing this page does not do is tell you where risk passes from seller to buyer under FOB, CFR or CIF. That question is answered in the text of the ICC rules themselves, not in the public summaries, and we do not have the official wording to quote, so we will not paraphrase it. The distinction above is purely about who pays and who controls, which the published material does support. Where risk sits across the whole payment structure, including how a letter of credit shifts it, is a separate subject: see letters of credit and the risk spectrum.

Containers against bulk: what the ICC actually recommends

There is a second split among the eleven rules, and it is the one most often ignored. FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF are the sea and inland waterway rules. FCA, CPT, CIP, DAP, DPU and DDP are written for any mode, including multimodal.

The ICC's teaching material is direct about when each maritime rule fits. In its words, "FOB is the appropriate rule when goods are transported in bulk between ports using maritime or inland waterway transportation," while "FCA is the appropriate rule when goods are transported in containers or pallets and multiple modes of transportation are used." So even the classic advice to trade on FOB is tied by the ICC to bulk cargo moving port to port. The moment the goods go into a container, the ICC names FCA, not FOB, as the fitting rule.

For Brazilian agricultural buying that lands in a clear place. Soy, corn and raw sugar move in bulk, and the maritime rules suit them. Coffee in bags, chilled or frozen beef in reefer containers, and hides move in containers, and for those the ICC points to FCA. A buyer who accepts FOB on a container shipment of meat because "everyone uses FOB" is using a rule the ICC itself says is written for a different kind of cargo. The same logic runs across the container-suited group of rules, though the ICC's own article states the FCA-versus-FOB pairing directly and does not spell the rest out, so treat the wider point as reasoning rather than a quotation.

Brazil's export ports

Brazil's waterway sector moved 1.32 billion tonnes in 2024, an ANTAQ record and the firmest national figure available. Trade press citing ANTAQ's 2025 data puts the following year at about 1.4 billion tonnes with soy alone at 139.7 million tonnes; that 2025 total reaches us secondhand through industry coverage of the ANTAQ report rather than from ANTAQ's own page, so read it as reported, not primary.

The most reliable comparable ranking of individual ports comes from ANTAQ's quarterly bulletin for the third quarter of 2025, covering the organised public ports. It is a single quarter, not a full year, and it excludes the private terminals, but it is the hardest like-for-like source there is.

Port (state)	Throughput, Q3 2025	Year on year
Santos (SP)	38.4 million t	+2.7%
Paranaguá (PR)	19.1 million t	+15.8%
Itaguaí (RJ)	17.3 million t	−1.4%
Itaqui (MA)	11.1 million t	+6.1%
Rio Grande (RS)	9.1 million t	+9.3%

Source: ANTAQ, Boletim Estatístico Aquaviário, 3rd quarter 2025. Itaguaí runs mostly on iron ore and coal rather than agricultural cargo, so for grain and sugar the order that matters is Santos, then Paranaguá, then Itaqui, then Rio Grande.

Full-year figures exist for two of these from official or state channels. Santos handled 186.4 million tonnes across 2025, its largest volume on record, up from 179.8 million in 2024, with soy at 44.9 million tonnes, sugar at 24.1, corn at 15.2 and wood pulp at 9.8; those come from the Santos Port Authority through Agência Brasil, the state news agency, since the port's own site would not open for direct citation, so treat them as reliable but secondhand. Itaqui reported 34.3 million tonnes for 2025 as of 27 November, already above its full 2024 total, on its operator EMAP's official site; because that reading predates year-end, it is a late-November figure, not a closed annual one. Annual totals circulating for Paranaguá and for Rio Grande appear only as headlines on state portals whose text did not open, so they are left out here rather than given as numbers.

Which port for which commodity

The commodity decides the port more than the other way around. Pulling together only the figures confirmed above:

Commodity	Main export port(s)	Basis
Soy (bulk)	Santos (44.9 mn t), Paranaguá, Rio Grande, Itaqui (15 to 16 mn t)	Santos APS, ANTAQ
Corn (bulk)	Santos (15.2 mn t), Itaqui, Paranaguá	Santos APS
Sugar (bulk)	Santos (24.1 mn t, the port's second commodity), Paranaguá	Santos APS
Coffee	Santos, Brazil's main coffee gateway	Santos APS, qualitative
Soybean meal (farelo)	Paranaguá, Rio Grande	ANTAQ, port authorities
Wood pulp	Rio Grande, Santos (9.8 mn t)	Santos APS
Meat in reefer containers	Santos, the country's largest container port	Santos APS

Two entries carry a caveat. Santos is Brazil's main coffee gateway, but the 2025 APS breakdown we have lists soy, sugar, corn and pulp by tonne and does not give a coffee tonnage, so there is no reliable 2025 coffee figure to quote. And while meat moves in reefer containers through Santos as the largest container port, no official "X tonnes of beef through port Y" figure was available; the right way to confirm a meat supplier is through the plant's export accreditation, not through port statistics. That check, and other exporter checks, are covered in verifying a Brazilian exporter.

Inland logistics and the FOB price

An FOB price at the port of shipment is the farm-gate price plus the cost of moving the crop to the port plus the port charges. The inland leg is not a small part of that, because of how Brazil moves freight.

The national modal split is 54% by road, 27% by rail and 19% by waterway, with air under 1%, per Infra S.A., published by the Ministry of Ports and Airports on 12 August 2026. Road dominance makes the farm-to-port leg expensive and sensitive to diesel and to distance. A farm far from its port carries a longer, costlier inland haul, and that cost sits inside the FOB figure the seller quotes. This is why the Arco Norte route matters: ports like Itaqui shorten the inland leg for soy and corn grown in the centre and north, which is part of why Itaqui's volume is rising. We do not publish inland freight rates in reais per tonne, or a basis premium, or logistics as a percentage of the soy price, because those were not gathered and we will not estimate them.

The takeaway for a buyer comparing two FOB offers from different ports is that the numbers already embed different inland distances. A cheaper farm-gate origin routed through a distant port can land at the same FOB as a dearer origin near its port, and the basis label will not show you which is which.

Reading a line-up and a port's loading

Buyers often want to see how busy a port is before fixing a shipment. Some of that is public and free, and some of it is commercial.

Individual ports and terminals publish their own vessel line-ups. Santos publishes scheduled berthings through the port authority, Paranaguá publishes line-up PDFs with columns for soy, meal and corn, and terminal operators publish berthing lists for their own quays. That gives you a real, free view at the level of one port or one terminal. What does not exist as a single free window is a national queue of ships across all ports. The country-wide, commodity-level line-up summaries that traders quote for soy and sugar are produced by commercial shipping agents, and those should be read as commercial, not official, sources.

There is also no official dataset that marks port loading peaks by month and commodity, with the soy or coffee harvest crest flagged as such. ANTAQ publishes monthly tonnages, but without that labelling. Seasonal peaks in the soy line-up are real and are reported, but the specific figures come from commercial agents and press, so treat them as market colour rather than as an official statistic. Confirming actual vessel condition and cargo before payment is a separate exercise from reading a line-up, covered in pre-shipment inspection.

Choosing a basis and a port

For a bulk crop, the maritime rules are the natural fit, and the real decision is whether you want to control the ocean leg. FOB puts the carrier choice in your hands and suits a buyer with freight capacity or a forwarder it trusts; CFR and CIF hand that to the seller, and CIF's insurance default is the minimum, so budget your own cover if you need more than that. For a container crop such as coffee in bags or meat in reefers, the ICC's own guidance is to reach for FCA before FOB.

The port then follows the commodity and the inland map. Santos and Paranaguá anchor the southern soy, sugar and coffee flows; Rio Grande carries pulp and southern soy; Itaqui and the northern route cut the inland haul for grain from the centre and north. Whichever port a seller quotes from, the FOB price already carries the inland distance behind it, so compare offers on landed terms, not on the basis label alone. The broader route from a first offer to a confirmed supplier is set out in sourcing from Brazil.

Sources

• Incoterms 2020 edition, rule structure, maritime rules, the A9/B9 cost article, CIF and CIP insurance levels, and the announced Incoterms 2030 work: ICC, iccwbo.org, and the ICC 2026 Global Policy Commissions workplan. Primary. The point where risk transfers under FOB, CFR and CIF sits in the paid rules text, which was not available, and is deliberately not stated here.
• Container versus bulk guidance, quoted directly: ICC Academy, "Incoterms 2020: FCA or FOB?", academy.iccwbo.org. ICC domain, teaching material rather than rules text. The extension to CPT and CIP is reasoning, not an ICC quotation.
• National waterway total 2024 (1.32 billion t): ANTAQ, gov.br, primary. National 2025 (about 1.4 billion t; soy 139.7 million t): trade press citing ANTAQ's 2025 report, secondary.
• Quarterly port ranking and cargo profile: ANTAQ, Boletim Estatístico Aquaviário, 3rd quarter 2025, gov.br. Primary, and the firmest comparable source.
• Santos 2025 figures (186.4 million t; soy 44.9, sugar 24.1, corn 15.2, pulp 9.8): Santos Port Authority via Agência Brasil (EBC), secondary. No 2025 coffee tonnage was available.
• Itaqui 2025 (34.3 million t as of 27 November 2025): EMAP official site. Primary, but a late-November reading, not a closed year.
• Modal split (54% road, 27% rail, 19% waterway): Infra S.A., published by the Ministry of Ports and Airports, 12 August 2026.
• Line-up availability: Santos and Paranaguá port authorities and their terminal operators for public port-level line-ups; commercial shipping agents for country-wide commodity summaries, marked commercial.

Facts on this page were checked on 8 September 2026. Port throughput and the rules around it are revised often, and several 2025 port totals are still provisional or secondhand as noted above. Check the current ANTAQ bulletin and the ICC rules text before relying on any number or basis described here.