Tanzania Sesame: Sourcing Guide

Overview

Sesame (Swahili: simsim or ufuta) is a smallholder-dominated export cash crop grown across at least 15 mainland regions. Trading now runs through a formal Warehouse Receipt System with auction-based price discovery, administered jointly by the Tanzania Mercantile Exchange (TMX), COPRA (Cereals and Other Produce Regulatory Authority), the Warehouse Receipts Regulatory Board (WRRB) and the Tanzania Cooperative Development Commission. Per the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2019/20 census, 99.8% of national sesame production came from smallholder farmers, not large-scale farms — and per NBS’s 2023/24 survey, 94.2% of household-grown sesame was sold unprocessed, the highest share of any oilseed/nut crop surveyed, confirming both the smallholder character and the raw-export orientation of the sector.

Production

Three separate NBS survey instruments give three independent data points, not a smooth trend: 56,846 tonnes (2016/17, Annual Sample Survey), 128,842 tonnes (2019/20, full National Census of Agriculture), and 144,589 tonnes at a national yield of 0.4 t/ha (2023/24, Annual Sample Survey). Press coverage citing unnamed sources reports considerably higher, more volatile figures for recent seasons (e.g. 257,040 tonnes for 2024/25) — these are not reconciled with the NBS series here and are not repeated as fact. Lindi Region was the largest single producer in the one survey year (2016/17) where a full regional breakdown was directly verified, followed by Pwani (Coast) and Ruvuma; Manyara, Dodoma, Singida, Songwe, Katavi, Morogoro, Mtwara and several other regions also appear consistently across TMX’s own trading-region list and press coverage.

Quality & Grading

Tanzania Bureau of Standards maintains a compulsory sesame-seed standard (cited as TZS 741, revision year unresolved between 2010 and 2018 in what we could access) alongside a separate standard for sesame oil (TZS 51:2020). We could not obtain the standard’s numeric purity/moisture/foreign-matter thresholds directly. One Tanzanian exporter’s own published commercial specification — not a national standard — states oil content minimum 52%, free fatty acid maximum 2%, and moisture maximum 7%. Tanzania’s sesame supply chain runs smallholder farmers → village traders → primary aggregators → processors/traders → exporters; this multi-tiered structure is documented (TraceX Technologies) as a source of bulk-mixing and loss of origin identity, with aflatoxin/mould risk tied to poor drying and storage infrastructure.

Trade Data

UN Comtrade (via World Bank WITS, HS 120740) records Tanzania’s sesame exports at 128,483 tonnes / US$225.6 million (2023) and 196,742 tonnes / US$268.2 million (2024) — a ranking of 5th-largest world exporter in 2024, behind India, Nigeria, Brazil and Pakistan. A separate, domestic-regulator figure from the Warehouse Receipts Regulatory Board puts 2024 exports at 150,000 tonnes and Sh300 billion, with farmers paid Sh2,700-3,800/kg that season — a different collection system (regulatory-board tally vs. international customs statistics) than Comtrade’s, and the two are not reconciled here. Destination markets named across sources include China, Japan, the United States, India and, per one bilateral-trade report, a fast-growing South Korea market (exports reportedly rising to US$51.6 million from a much smaller prior-year base). China’s own import appetite is large (900,000-1,100,000+ tonnes/year across all origins, mainly for oil extraction) but Tanzania’s specific share of that market could not be verified to a reliable figure and is not stated here.

Suppliers & Exporters

Megnacio Co. Ltd (Dar es Salaam) publishes a detailed, internally-consistent commercial specification and sourcing description on its own site (real street address and phone number given), though without independent third-party corroboration. Kili Quality (Moshi) states sourcing from Lindi, Mtwara and Singida for export to China, Japan, Turkey and India, again self-reported. A widely-circulated claim naming Dutch vegetable-seed breeders Rijk Zwaan and Enza Zaden as “top Tanzania sesame exporters” (sourced to a paid trade-data aggregator) is almost certainly a shipment-classification error — those are vegetable-seed genetics companies, not commodity sesame traders — and is not repeated here as fact.

What We Don’t Know

FAOSTAT’s own production database could not be directly queried during this research pass, so widely-cited figures like “710,000 tonnes (2020)” or “3rd-largest world producer” are not repeated here without that verification. No Bank of Tanzania or NBS sesame-specific market-price bulletin was located — the price figures above come from TMX’s own auction-procedure document (charges/margins, not spot prices) or from news coverage of specific named auctions, not a systematic government price series. Exact planting/harvest calendar months, and the commercial white-vs-mixed-seed market distinction, could not be confirmed against a primary source and are omitted rather than guessed at.