Agriculture’s Share of Tanzania’s Export Earnings, 2022–2026: What the Bank of Tanzania’s Own Numbers Show

The headline number, and the one nobody’s reporting

Traditional agricultural exports — cashewnuts, coffee, tobacco, cotton, sisal, tea and cloves — made up 15.7% of Tanzania’s total goods export earnings in the year ending February 2026. That is the highest share recorded in the Bank of Tanzania’s (BoT) own five-year export data, not the lowest. In the year ending February 2022, the same crops accounted for just 10.0% of goods exports. Gold, over the same stretch, went from 38.9% of goods exports to 45.8%.

Both series rose. That single fact should reframe how the “gold is swallowing agriculture” narrative gets told. This piece works through the Bank of Tanzania’s Table A6 (“Exports of Goods”) as published in two Monthly Economic Review issues — the edition covering the year ending December 2024, and the edition covering the year ending February 2026 — to lay out what a multi-year structural view of export composition actually shows, separate from any single month’s snapshot.

The data, year by year

The table below is built directly from BoT’s Table A6 in its Monthly Economic Review, using the “year ending February” rolling 12-month series that runs from 2022 through the provisional figure for 2026. Two rows are not BoT line items: “All agricultural export lines (author’s aggregate)” and its percentage share are our own sum of every commodity row in Table A6 that is agricultural in nature — the seven traditional crops plus horticultural products, cereals, oilseeds, cocoa and beans — because BoT’s own “traditional/non-traditional” split does not equal “agricultural/non-agricultural.” That distinction matters and is explained further below.

USD million (year ending February)	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026p
Total goods exports	6,878.6	7,350.8	7,769.7	9,433.9	10,842.9
Traditional exports (BoT category)	687.0	748.7	1,022.7	1,484.1	1,699.6
— as % of total goods exports	10.0%	10.2%	13.2%	15.7%	15.7%
o/w Tobacco	138.8	174.8	376.0	525.4	625.7
o/w Cashewnuts	192.2	202.7	224.2	522.3	493.5
o/w Coffee	161.9	171.3	234.7	323.5	403.8
o/w Cotton	83.6	104.6	108.8	59.7	100.2
Non-traditional exports (BoT category)	5,809.3	6,195.0	6,340.1	7,535.1	8,814.2
o/w Minerals (total)	3,096.1	3,521.1	3,536.1	4,395.0	5,644.4
o/w Gold	2,673.2	2,872.6	3,114.7	3,658.9	4,968.4
— Gold as % of total goods exports	38.9%	39.1%	40.1%	38.8%	45.8%
o/w Manufactured goods	1,243.0	1,449.3	1,375.4	1,351.8	1,675.0
o/w Horticultural products	382.5	290.3	425.4	499.3	465.1
o/w Edible vegetables	312.0	206.3	320.0	388.5	335.6
o/w Cereals	410.3	266.6	176.4	328.1	198.9
o/w Oil seeds	172.0	173.0	306.0	297.7	272.0
o/w Cocoa (within “other exports”)	27.2	26.8	46.5	101.5	104.9
All agricultural export lines (author’s aggregate)	1,754.4	1,538.0	2,030.0	2,714.0	2,742.6
— as % of total goods exports	25.5%	20.9%	26.1%	28.8%	25.3%

Source: Bank of Tanzania, Monthly Economic Review, March 2026 issue, Table A6 “Exports of Goods.” Figures are for rolling 12-month periods ending February of the stated year; 2026 is provisional (p). Bolded rows are the author’s own sum of agricultural commodity lines, not a Bank of Tanzania category.

Agriculture’s narrow share is climbing, not shrinking

Take BoT’s own “traditional exports” line first, since it is the closest thing the Bank publishes to a pure agriculture-export figure (all seven items — cashewnuts, cloves, coffee, cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco — are farm crops with no mineral or manufacturing content). Its share of total goods exports moved from 10.0% (2022) to 10.2% (2023) to 13.2% (2024) to 15.7% (2025) to 15.7% again (2026, provisional). That is a rise of roughly 5.7 percentage points over four years — not a decline.

Looking one series further back reinforces that this isn’t a one-off blip. BoT’s year-ending-December table shows traditional exports at 12.7% of total goods exports in 2020, dropping to 9.3% in 2021, before climbing back to 10.6% (2022), 12.4% (2023) and 15.0% (2024). Read across both series, the shape is a dip during 2021 followed by a steady climb through 2024, 2025 and into 2026 — not a gold-driven squeeze on agriculture’s share.

Gold’s share isn’t on a one-way trip up, either

Gold’s share of goods exports also isn’t a story of relentless, uninterrupted ascent. Using the year-ending-December series, gold accounted for 46.4% of total goods exports in 2020 — actually higher than in any of the following three years. It fell to 40.5% in 2021 and 39.2% in 2022, before recovering to 39.7% (2023) and 36.8% (2024, provisional). Only in the more recent year-ending-February series does the share jump sharply again — from 38.8% (2025) to 45.8% (2026, provisional) — which lines up with the same gold-price and volume surge that export.tz’s “Tanzania Trade Numbers: September 2026 Digest” documented for the year ending July 2026 (gold at 47.4% of goods export earnings).

Put the two pictures together: gold’s 2020 spike coincided with global safe-haven demand during the pandemic; it eased back through the middle of the decade even as gold production kept growing in absolute dollar terms; and it has surged again through 2025-2026 on renewed global gold prices. Agriculture’s traditional-export share, meanwhile, has been on a comparatively steady climb across the same stretch. The two series are not moving as mirror images of one another — they mostly moved independently, and in the most recent two years, both climbed at once. That rules out a simple “gold is displacing agriculture” story; the data instead shows a widening export pie in which several categories, including agriculture, have been growing their dollar totals, even where their percentage shares diverge or overlap in more complicated ways.

Where the “10-16%” figure actually undercounts agriculture

The 10-16% range only counts BoT’s seven “traditional” crops. It excludes several other genuinely agricultural export lines that BoT itself classifies as “non-traditional”: horticultural products (mostly edible vegetables, plus fruits and cut flowers), cereals (maize, rice and other grains), oilseeds, and cocoa and beans (both filed under “other exports”). None of these are minerals or manufactures — they are farm output, just not part of the old colonial-era “traditional crops” list that BoT’s category preserves for historical continuity.

Summing all of these agricultural lines together (see the bolded rows in the table above) gives a fuller — though not officially published — picture: agriculture’s real footprint in Tanzania’s goods exports has run in a band of roughly 20.9% to 28.8% of total goods exports across the five years measured, with no clean upward or downward trend once the full range of crops is counted; it moved from 25.5% (2022) down to 20.9% (2023), up to 26.1% (2024) and 28.8% (2025), then back to 25.3% (2026, provisional). That volatility is real and largely driven by weather-sensitive crops: cereals swung from USD 410.3 million to USD 176.4 million and back to USD 328.1 million across three consecutive years, and the “beans” line collapsed sharply toward the end of the period.

The honest conclusion from this broader count is that agriculture’s aggregate share has been unstable rather than declining — bouncing within roughly a seven-to-eight-point band rather than following gold, minerals or manufacturing in either direction.

Which crops actually carry Tanzanian agriculture’s exports

Within the traditional-crop list, three commodities dominate every one of the last five years measured: tobacco, cashewnuts and coffee. Their relative order has shifted — cashewnuts led in 2022 (USD 192.2 million) and 2023 (USD 202.7 million), while tobacco has been the single largest traditional export in three of the last four years measured, reaching USD 625.7 million in the year ending February 2026, ahead of cashewnuts (USD 493.5 million) and coffee (USD 403.8 million) in the same period. Cotton is a distant fourth (USD 100.2 million in 2026p), with sisal, cloves and tea each below USD 35 million.

Outside the “traditional” category, edible vegetables are a genuinely large agricultural export line that rarely gets discussed alongside cashews or coffee: USD 335.6 million in the year ending February 2026 — more than cotton, sisal, tea and cloves combined. Cocoa, while still small in absolute terms, has grown nearly fourfold in five years, from USD 27.2 million (2022) to USD 104.9 million (2026p), tracking the same global cocoa-price boom that has been visible in commodity markets generally — see Chocolate.tz for the processing side of that story.

What the data does and doesn’t tell you

To be precise about what is fact and what is interpretation: the figures above — the dollar values, the year-on-year totals, the category breakdowns — are as published in BoT’s Table A6 in the two Monthly Economic Review issues cited below, cross-checked against BoT’s own text commentary in the same reports (for example, BoT’s March 2026 issue states traditional exports “registered a growth of 14.5 percent to USD 1,699.6 million in the year ending February 2026,” which matches the table exactly). The percentage-share calculations, the “all agricultural lines” aggregate, and the framing that agriculture’s narrow share has risen rather than fallen are our own arithmetic and interpretation applied to those published figures — clearly separated from the source numbers in the table above.

What the data does not support is any claim that gold’s rise has “caused” a change, up or down, in agriculture’s export share. Neither BoT report makes that causal claim, and the two series’ independent, sometimes-simultaneous movements in this dataset argue against treating them as a simple zero-sum trade-off. A more defensible reading is that Tanzania’s total goods export base has been expanding across nearly every category — gold, other minerals, manufactured goods, and multiple categories of agricultural produce all grew in absolute dollar terms over the period measured — and that the “gold is eating agriculture’s share” framing, however intuitive, is not what BoT’s own composition tables show for the years actually measured here.

One further limitation: BoT’s Monthly Economic Review tables use rolling 12-month “year ending [month]” windows rather than clean calendar years, and the two source issues used here report on different closing months (December 2024 and February 2026 respectively), so figures for a given calendar year are not always directly comparable across the two series. This is standard for BoT’s own publication practice and is flagged here for transparency.