Everyone Says Kenya Buys Tanzania’s Rice. Official Data Says Uganda Buys Twice as Much.

Trade reporting on Tanzania’s rice exports has repeatedly named Kenya as the dominant buyer. Official FAOSTAT trade data tells a different story: Uganda has been Tanzania’s largest rice export destination every year from 2019 to 2024, buying roughly twice Kenya’s volume in most years.

What the official data actually shows

FAOSTAT’s Detailed Trade Matrix, using item 31 (“Rice, milled” — the officially-flagged series, distinct from a separate FAO-estimated aggregate), shows Uganda taking 50,815 tonnes in 2019, rising to 344,809 tonnes in 2021, and still 284,381 tonnes in 2024. Kenya, by comparison, took 142,181 tonnes in 2021 and 44,426 tonnes in 2024 — consistently Tanzania’s #2 destination, not its #1. Rwanda is a steady #3. Together Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya account for roughly 98% of Tanzania’s declared rice export volume most years.

This is overwhelmingly intra-East African Community land-border trade, not a story about distant importers.

Why the “Kenya dominant” framing took hold

A recent USDA FAS GAIN report on Tanzania rice states that Kenya is “overwhelmingly dominating demand” for Tanzanian rice exports. That report’s trade figures come from Trade Data Monitor, a commercial mirror-data provider — and in every year checked, that source shows zero recorded trade with Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi or DR Congo at all. Those four countries do report their own trade data to FAOSTAT; the commercial source simply does not capture land-border EAC flows the way customs-to-customs reporting does. The result is a real, large blind spot — not a disagreement about which number is right, but a source that is structurally missing most of the trade it is describing.

A genuine open question in the numbers

Two things in the official data don’t yet have a clean explanation, and we’re publishing them as open questions rather than picking an answer:

First, a bilateral mismatch: in 2021, Uganda’s own import statistics report receiving 492,878 tonnes of rice from Tanzania, while Tanzania’s export statistics for the same year declare only 352,237 tonnes sent — a 40% gap in one direction. Dar es Salaam is Uganda’s nearest seaport, so some of this may be cargo in transit being counted as Tanzanian-origin on the Ugandan side rather than a true discrepancy in Tanzanian exports. We don’t know which, so we show both figures rather than merging them.

Second, a 2024 price puzzle: Tanzania’s declared rice exports to Kenya were valued at roughly $1,264 per tonne that year, against roughly $380 per tonne for the much larger volume sent to Uganda — a 3.3x gap between two neighbouring markets in the same year. It may reflect a genuine quality/grade difference (premium aromatic rice to one market, bulk rice to the other) or a reporting artefact. We’re not resolving it here; it’s flagged on the data pages as something worth watching rather than averaged away.

What this means for reading Tanzania’s rice trade

If you’re relying on commercial trade-data aggregators for a picture of Tanzania’s agricultural export markets, it’s worth checking whether land-border EAC trade is actually in scope — for rice, missing it means missing roughly three-quarters of the real volume. The Market Snapshot on this site now carries Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi and DR Congo as separate, officially-sourced destination series rather than a single blended total, specifically so this kind of gap is visible rather than hidden inside an aggregate.

This complements our earlier look at Tanzania’s rice price history — together they cover both sides of the market: what Tanzanian rice sells for, and who is actually buying it.

Sources: FAOSTAT Detailed Trade Matrix (bulk data, item 31 “Rice, milled”), Tanzania as reporter, 2019-2024, retrieved 2026-10-07; UN Comtrade public preview API (HS 100630), cross-validated at 6-digit level; USDA FAS GAIN report TZ2026-0002 (18 March 2026), Trade Data Monitor LLC trade-partner data.