Pakistan and India Buy Three-Quarters of Tanzania’s Cotton Exports — Not Europe

Tanzania’s cotton lint doesn’t go to European textile mills in any meaningful volume. According to the Tanzania Cotton Board’s own destination-by-season export register, Pakistan and India together bought roughly 77% of Tanzania’s cotton lint exports by value in the 2024/25 season — and Asian buyers as a group (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China and Vietnam) accounted for nearly 96%. Europe’s entire share, spread across Germany, Italy, Belgium and Portugal, came to just over 1%.

The 2024/25 destination breakdown

By FOB export value: Pakistan $29.4 million, India $27.5 million, Bangladesh $7.2 million, China $3.6 million, Vietnam $3.1 million, Turkey $2.0 million. Everything else — Kenya, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Indonesia, Rwanda — totals under $1 million combined. The pattern is the same by volume: Pakistan (91,319 bales) and India (85,396 bales) are the two buyers that matter; the rest are fractional by comparison.

Why this isn’t surprising, once you see it

This mirrors a pattern now visible across several of Tanzania’s raw-commodity exports on this network: the buyers are the countries with the processing capacity, not the countries with the final consumer market. Pakistan and India have two of the world’s largest spinning-mill industries; European demand for cotton yarn is largely met by mills in South and East Asia rather than by direct raw-lint imports into Europe itself. Tanzania’s cotton, in other words, is one input into an Asian manufacturing chain whose finished textiles may well end up back in European or American retail — just not as a direct trade relationship visible in Tanzania’s own export data.

What the data doesn’t yet tell us

This is a single season’s destination breakdown (2024/25), sourced directly from TCB’s own 10-season destination register. We haven’t yet established how stable this Pakistan/India dominance is across the other nine seasons in that register, or whether China and Vietnam’s shares have been rising or falling — that’s a natural next step once the full multi-season table is in the data pages rather than just the most recent year. Treat the 77%/96% figures above as a snapshot of the latest season, not yet a confirmed multi-year trend.

Source: Tanzania Cotton Board, “Cotton Lint Exports Destination & Values,” 10-season destination register, 2024/25 season figures. Bale-to-tonne conversions use TCB’s own stated standard bale weight of 206kg.