Ten Seasons of Tanzania Cotton, Straight From the Regulator
Published 5 October 2026 · Commodities.tz Editorial
The Tanzania Cotton Board (TCB) publishes its own ten-season national seed cotton production table, 2015/16 through 2024/25. It is one of the stronger primary datasets available for any thin Tanzanian export commodity, and it checks out against independent international data.
A volatile decade, not a steady trend
National seed cotton production swung from a low of 122,362 tonnes (2016/17) to a high of 348,963 tonnes (2019/20) across the ten seasons — nearly a 3x range, driven by rainfall, input access and farmgate-price incentives rather than a smooth growth curve. The most recent season on file, 2024/25, came in at 149,361 tonnes, roughly mid-range historically and well below the 2019/20 and 2023/24 (282,316t) peaks.
Cross-checked, not just cited
FAOSTAT’s independently-compiled seed cotton series for Tanzania — mostly flagged as official data from 1963 onward, unusually clean for a thin commodity — closely tracks the Board’s own figures in the overlapping recent years (2022: both sources report almost exactly 144,792 tonnes). That agreement is a meaningful validity signal for both series, and it is why Cotton.tz can now show 64 years of area, yield and production data with confidence rather than a single disputed number.
Where the Western Zone dominance comes from
Tanzania’s cotton belt is heavily concentrated in the Western Cotton Growing Area (Shinyanga, Simiyu, Mwanza, Geita, Mara, Kagera, Tabora, Kigoma, Singida, Katavi, Dodoma, Manyara) rather than the smaller Eastern zone (Morogoro, Kilimanjaro, Pwani, Tanga, Iringa) — in most seasons the Western zone alone accounts for 98-99.9% of national output.
What is still missing
No official farmgate or indicative price figure is published anywhere for Tanzanian cotton — FAOSTAT’s producer-price dataset has zero entries for Tanzania cotton, the same void found across most of Tanzania’s thin export crops. A specific 2026-season indicative price from the Tanzania Cotton Association has been identified as a source but not yet extracted into a structured figure. NBS crop-cut survey figures also diverge from the Board’s marketing-delivery data by up to 20% in some seasons — a known, unresolved difference in measurement method, not an error in either series.
Sources: Tanzania Cotton Board, "Uzalishaji Pamba Mbegu Nchini Misimu 10" (tcb.go.tz); FAOSTAT production bulk data, 2026 retrieval.