Tanzania’s Spice Basket: What’s Actually Grown, Traded and Tracked
Published 7 October 2026 · Commodities.tz Editorial
Spices.tz is an umbrella: Tanzania does not run a single “spice” ministry or export category, it runs a cluster of distinct crops — clove, black pepper, cardamom, vanilla, chilli, and smaller lines like ginger and cinnamon — each with its own growing regions, trade classification, and market. This page is a map of that cluster, drawing on the production and trade data already published on each crop’s own portal rather than inventing a combined “spice” statistic that doesn’t exist in any government dataset.
By volume, chilli and clove dominate
On raw tonnage, two crops carry Tanzania’s spice production. Chilli output was 15,855 tonnes nationally in 2024 (15,851t in 2023) — the largest volume in the basket, grown across mainland regions for both domestic consumption and export. Clove, Zanzibar’s signature crop, ran 8,575 tonnes in 2024 (8,582t in 2023), a figure that has stayed within a narrow band year to year. Black pepper, by contrast, is a much smaller crop at just 437 tonnes of national production in 2024 — but it is, perversely, the best-documented of the five on this network, because its export trail through UN Comtrade is unusually clean (see below).
By trade visibility, black pepper is the outlier — in a good way
Export destination data exists in real, per-country detail for exactly one crop in this basket: black pepper. Tanzania’s 2024 pepper exports reached roughly $2.96–3.0 million across both whole (HS 090411) and crushed/ground (HS 090412) classifications, with named buyers including the United Arab Emirates ($656,848), Germany (a combined $516,519 across both HS lines), India (a combined $482,367 across both HS lines), the Netherlands ($308,745), and smaller volumes to Italy, Pakistan and Egypt. No other crop in Tanzania’s spice basket has this level of destination granularity published anywhere — not because the trade doesn’t happen, but because the underlying Comtrade and government series for clove, cardamom and chilli don’t break out by destination the way pepper’s does. That is a data-availability gap, not a production gap, and it is the single clearest opportunity for this network to extend into: the ingestion method already built for pepper is a direct template for the others.
Cardamom: real, but modest by world standards
Tanzania exported 348,179 kg of cardamom in 2024, worth $3.68 million — a meaningful jump from 2023’s roughly $560,000–$569,000 (two closely-aligned source figures exist for that year). Tanzania’s cardamom production, at roughly 800 tonnes (2023), is real and growing, but is not globally dominant — claims that Tanzania ranks among the world’s very top cardamom producers do not hold up against current international production data, and this page won’t repeat that claim uncritically. What’s true is narrower and still useful: Tanzania has an active, exporting cardamom sector with a verifiable trade value.
Vanilla: smallest volume, highest value per kilogram
Tanzania’s vanilla exports were 18.28 tonnes worth $295,000 in 2024 (down from 15.9t/$594,000 in 2023 by volume terms, though the value drop is sharper than the volume drop, implying a lower realized price per kilogram year-on-year). Vanilla is the smallest crop in this basket by tonnage and the only one where Tanzania is explicitly positioned as an emerging, specialty-scale origin rather than a volume competitor — Madagascar’s own exports run in the thousands of tonnes, a different order of magnitude entirely.
A caution about combined “spice” trade figures
Readers researching Tanzania’s spice trade will encounter a widely-cited UN Comtrade category, HS09, that bundles coffee, tea, maté and spices into one reporting line — a 2024 Tanzania total of roughly $351.6 million under that combined code, including $31.2 million attributed to Italy alone. That number is not a spices figure; coffee dominates it. Wherever this network cites that source, we label it explicitly as bundled (look for the dagger mark on the Top Export Markets tables) rather than present it as if it were comparable to the clean, crop-specific figures above.
Explore each crop
For full historical production and trade series, visit each crop’s own portal: Clove.tz, BlackPepper.tz, Cardamom.tz, Vanilla.tz, and Chilli.tz. This page will stay a map, not a duplicate — figures here are drawn from those portals’ own published, sourced data.
- All figures drawn directly from this network's own published production_trade_data rows for clove, blackpepper, cardamom, vanilla and chilli (see each commodity's own Sources & Methodology page for underlying attribution: FAOSTAT, UN Comtrade, COPRA, OCGS). The bundled HS09 figure is sourced to TrendEconomy/UN Comtrade and is flagged, not endorsed, in this article. Compiled 7 October 2026.