Tanzania’s Two Official Sesame Counts Disagree by 2x. We’re Showing Both.
Published 5 October 2026 · Commodities.tz Editorial
For 2022/23, Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics reports sesame production of 158,688 tonnes. The Ministry of Agriculture’s own administrative series reports 79,170 tonnes for the same season — almost exactly half. Neither figure is wrong in the sense of being fabricated; they are measuring different things.
Why two government numbers can both be right
The NBS figure comes from a household agricultural survey (a sampled, statistically-weighted count). The Ministry figure comes from an administrative series — aggregated reporting through extension offices and regional authorities. Survey and administrative counts routinely diverge for smallholder-dominated crops with informal, undocumented sales channels, which describes Tanzanian sesame well: NBS’s own 2023/24 data shows 94.2% of national sesame production sold unprocessed, much of it through channels that an administrative count is more likely to miss or undercount. We show both series on this site, clearly labeled by source, rather than merging or averaging them into a single misleadingly precise number.
What is solid: the export story
Tanzania’s sesame export trajectory is on firmer ground. FAOSTAT data (official-flagged for most years) shows Tanzania ranked the world’s 4th or 5th-largest sesame exporter by volume in 2022-2024, with a 6.1% to 8.6% world export share. China’s share of that export volume has risen sharply, from roughly 50% a decade ago to around 85% in recent years — a real concentration story, not a data artifact. Tanzania exports an estimated 72% of what it produces, underlining how export-oriented the sector already is.
A number we did not publish
FAOSTAT’s production series for Tanzania sesame carries an “X” flag (figure from international organizations, not Tanzania’s own data) for 2013-2019, and those specific years run 3 to 13 times higher than both Tanzanian government series for the same period. That contradiction is large enough that we have not published those specific years as fact — they remain a known, flagged gap rather than a filled-in number.
Sources: NBS National Sample Census of Agriculture and AASS; Ministry of Agriculture administrative series; FAOSTAT production and trade bulk data, 2026 retrieval.