Zanzibar Cloves: Origin, Production and Trade

A sultan’s cash crop

Zanzibar’s clove economy took shape under Omani rule. Sultan Said bin Sultan relocated the Omani capital itself to Stone Town in 1840 and actively encouraged clove plantations — worked by enslaved labour under conditions so severe that roughly 30% of male slaves are estimated to have died annually, driving continuous demand for further slave imports. By the 1840s this system had made Zanzibar and Pemba the largest clove producers in the world, and Stone Town among the wealthiest cities in East Africa.

Decline, then nationalization

That plantation economy began to erode under British colonial administration in the early 20th century, when slavery was formally abolished. The more decisive break came with the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution: the new government nationalized all land, including clove plantations, and redistributed it to smallholder farmers under a “three-acre policy” — by 1974 an estimated 22,262 tenants had received three-acre plots. In 1966 the government established the Zanzibar State Trading Corporation (ZSTC) and gave it a legal monopoly over both internal marketing and export of cloves — a monopoly that still stands. Roughly half of ZSTC’s profits from clove exports are captured directly by the government.

The market Zanzibar faces now

Pemba island alone still produces about 80% of Zanzibar’s clove harvest. Export volumes collapsed from roughly 3,900 tonnes to about 1,200 tonnes in the year ending September 2025, with export value falling 76%, from $26.3 million to $6.3 million. ZSTC attributes this to weaker domestic output and a global market now crowded with newer producers. In response, ZSTC has begun sourcing supplementary volumes — around 500 tonnes for the 2024/25 season — from mainland growers in Tanga and Morogoro.

Why this history matters to a buyer today

Zanzibar cloves are still sold through a single state-controlled channel — there is no open farmgate or private export market, unlike coffee or cashews. Any buyer engaging with Zanzibar cloves is, in effect, negotiating within a structure whose logic was set in 1966 and whose commercial position was set in the 1840s.