China Buys Virtually All of Tanzania’s Sesame — the Other 20% Isn’t Broken Out Yet

China buys almost all of the Tanzanian sesame that this site can currently trace to a named destination. In 2023, 2024 and 2025, China accounted for well over 95% of the combined China-plus-Turkey export value — the two largest declared markets by a wide margin — and the gap between them has been widening, not closing.

The numbers, year by year

Turkey’s volume more than tripled between 2023 and 2024 and has stayed at roughly that level since — a real second market has opened up, even if it remains small next to China. China’s own volume has grown every year on file, from 130,210 tonnes in 2023 to 168,218 tonnes in 2025.

What this does and doesn’t cover

China and Turkey are the only two destinations this site currently has broken out as named, per-country series for sesame. They do not account for all of Tanzania’s declared sesame exports: against the national export-value totals on file ($225.6m in 2023, $268.2m in 2024), China and Turkey together cover roughly 83% of 2023’s total and 77% of 2024’s — leaving a real 17–23% of declared export value going to destinations not yet broken out in this dataset. We’re stating that gap plainly rather than implying China and Turkey are the whole market; a South Korea-linked flow reported in Tanzanian press for 2025 is one piece of that remainder, and more destinations likely make up the rest.

This is the same honest-gap approach this site takes elsewhere: a smaller, verified breakdown is preferable to a complete-looking one built by assumption.

Why China, and why now

China is both the world’s largest sesame importer and the largest buyer of Tanzanian sesame specifically — sesame oil and tahini-adjacent food manufacturing in China consumes far more seed than Chinese farmland can supply. Tanzania, alongside Sudan, Ethiopia and Nigeria, is one of several African origins that has scaled into that demand over the past decade. Turkey’s smaller but growing share likely reflects its own position as a sesame-processing and re-export hub for tahini and confectionery (notably halva and sesame-topped bread products) rather than end consumption on the same scale as China.

None of this is modelled here as cause and effect — it is offered as plausible context for a pattern the trade data shows clearly: a single buyer this dominant is a concentration risk as well as a commercial success. A disruption in Chinese import demand — a policy change, a competing origin undercutting on price, a shift in Chinese domestic production — would have an outsized effect on Tanzania’s sesame export earnings precisely because there is, on the data available here, no comparably sized second market yet.

How this fits with the rest of our sesame coverage

This is a market-structure question, not a production-volume one — for the separate question of how much sesame Tanzania actually produces, where the country’s two official data series diverge by roughly 2x, see our earlier piece on that disagreement. Read together, the two pieces cover the two things a buyer or policymaker would actually want to know: how much Tanzania grows (contested), and who buys what does get exported (heavily concentrated in one market).

Sources: UN Comtrade public preview API, Tanzania (reporter 834) exports, HS 120740 (sesame seeds), by destination partner, 2023–2025, retrieved via this site’s automated destination-trade ingestion; national export totals from the same Comtrade series and FAOSTAT’s Detailed Trade Matrix, cross-referenced against this site’s published Market Snapshot figures.