Tanzania Sells Abroad Only a Sliver of the Honey It Produces — That Gap Is the Real Story

Tanzania’s honey production numbers and its export numbers tell two very different stories, and the distance between them is the most useful thing a prospective buyer can understand about the sector right now.

What’s actually being produced

Estimates of national output vary by source and year, which itself says something about how young the sector’s data infrastructure still is. A February 2026 journal article put annual production at “over 31,000 tonnes” as of 2021, rising to roughly 33,276 tonnes by 2024. Tanzania’s own 10-year sector program, launched in 2025, uses a 33,861-tonne baseline. A separate 2026 report on beekeeper training put the 2024 harvest at 32,000 tonnes against an estimated production potential of 52,000 tonnes from existing hive stock — a 20,000-tonne annual shortfall attributed to under-management rather than a lack of bees. A 2024 report citing a theoretical capacity of 138,000 tonnes put actual output at just 22 percent of that ceiling. The estimates disagree on the size of the untapped potential, but they agree on the shape of the problem: Tanzania is not short of bees or forage, it is short of harvest and management capacity.

What’s actually crossing a border

Formal honey export volume rose from 951.6 tonnes in 2024 to 1,596.8 tonnes in 2025 — a 67.8 percent increase — with export revenue climbing from 11.4 billion Tanzanian shillings to 19.2 billion shillings (roughly $7.37 million), a 68.4 percent rise. Set against even the more conservative 32,000-tonne production estimate, formal exports represent under 5 percent of what the country produces; the rest is consumed domestically or moves through informal channels that don’t register in trade statistics.

That export growth has come with market diversification. Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism reported that improved quality compliance opened export access to the United States, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, China, and — for the first time in the 2025/26 season — the United Kingdom. The China entry is dated specifically: a first 10-tonne shipment was flagged off in Dar es Salaam in December 2024 following Tanzania’s participation in the China International Import Expo, after exporters met Chinese requirements on laboratory testing and glass packaging. On production rankings, Tanzania places first in the East African Community, second in the Southern African Development Community, and 14th globally for honey output.

The policy bet: 5 percent to 30 percent

In 2025, Tanzania launched a 10-year program — publicly branded “Achia Shoka, Tundika Mzinga” (“put down the axe, hang the hive”) — targeting an increase in national honey production from the 33,861-tonne baseline to 75,000 tonnes annually by 2035, alongside a specific goal of raising the share of production that is formally exported from roughly 5 percent to 30 percent. The 2026/27 budget year alone is set to train more than 3,000 beekeepers and distribute 11,000 modern beehives, following 2025/26 figures of 4,934 beekeepers trained and 9,215 hives distributed.

Reading the trend as a buyer

None of this makes Tanzania a large honey exporter today — 1,600 tonnes is a modest figure against global producers. What it signals is a market moving from near-zero formal export infrastructure toward compliance-driven growth, with government targets, new destination markets, and processing investment arriving in the same two-year window. For buyers willing to work with a still-forming supply chain, that trajectory — rather than current volume — is the relevant data point.