Sugar in Tanzania

Almost every argument about sugar in Tanzania turns on a distinction that rarely makes the headlines. Household sugar, the kind sold in shops, is made by the country's own estates. Industrial sugar, the refined kind that soft-drink plants, breweries, bakeries and pharmaceutical firms buy by the container, is a different product, and Tanzania has never made much of it. Roughly 250,000 tonnes of it is imported each year.

So the country can be self-sufficient and short of sugar at the same time, depending on which sugar is meant. When a minister says Tanzania no longer needs to import, it is the household kind being counted. When a soft-drink factory complains about import permits, it is the industrial kind.

The gap is narrowing at one end. Mkulazi, the state-linked producer in Morogoro, has installed plant intended to make 50,000 tonnes of industrial sugar a year — useful, but a fraction of what the factories use.

Sugar is not a smallholder crop like coffee. It is grown on a handful of large irrigated estates, each with its own mill, because cane has to be crushed within a day or two of cutting. Around them, registered outgrowers — farmers with their own plots under cane — supply a large share of what the mills crush.

The biggest is Kilombero, in the Kilombero valley of Morogoro, with two estates and mills at Msolwa and Ruembe. It is majority-owned by Illovo Sugar Africa, part of the British group Associated British Foods, with the Tanzanian government holding 25 per cent. Its new K4 mill, a USD 292 million expansion, is meant to take the company to about 271,000 tonnes a season, more than double what it made before.

TPC, on the plain south of Moshi, is the oldest. Kagera Sugar on the western lake shore, Mtibwa at Turiani in Morogoro, Mkulazi, Bagamoyo and Manyara Sugar make up the seven. Together, the Minister for Industry and Trade told Parliament in June 2026, they have an installed capacity of about 800,000 tonnes a year and employ some 28,500 people directly.

Sugar has been made in Tanzania for ninety years. A Danish company, A/S Tanganyika Planting Company, planted cane on the irrigated flat at Arusha Chini, south of Moshi, and took its first harvest in 1936: about 4,000 tonnes. The estate is still there, and still called TPC.

The Kilombero estate followed in the 1960s, in the valley that had the water and the land for it, Mtibwa followed, and Kagera Sugar was founded in 1973. All of them passed into state hands, and by the 1990s all of them were struggling.

They were sold back to private owners around the turn of the century — Illovo took a majority of Kilombero in 1998, and TPC went to Mauritian investors in 2000, in both cases with the government keeping a quarter. Kagera Sugar was re-incorporated in its present form in 2002. The newest producers, Mkulazi and Bagamoyo, date from about 2016 and are the state's and a Tanzanian conglomerate's answer to the import bill.

In the 2024/25 season the country's mills crushed 4.71 million tonnes of cane and made about 431,700 tonnes of sugar, on the Sugar Board's figures, against roughly 367,700 tonnes in 2020/21. In October 2025 the government announced that Tanzania had covered its own household demand and had exported 85,000 tonnes for about USD 72 million, the first such sale in the country's history.

The figures are worth handling carefully. The same season has been reported officially as both 431,736.74 and 453,382.56 tonnes. In October 2025 the Sugar Board's director general, Prof Kenneth Bengesi, said production had "already exceeded 600,000 tonnes" against demand of 550,000 — a number far above either season figure, and closer to the industry's installed capacity than to its output. The target date for self-sufficiency has itself moved: first 2025, then 2025/26, then 2026/27, and in one 2026 statement, 2030.

Eight months after the export announcement, sugar disappeared from the shelves. By late June 2026 a kilogramme was selling for as much as TSh 5,000 in some places, against the usual TSh 2,800 to 3,000.

The causes were mostly to do with timing. The crushing season started late; heavy rain held up harvesting, at Kagera in particular; the factories take their annual maintenance shutdown between March and May; and Kilombero's new K4 mill was late starting while the old one stood idle. The Sugar Board approved about 110,000 tonnes of imports to fill the gap, with permits going to MeTL, Kagera Sugar and Zenji Enterprises. By July the mills were running again.

It is a recurring pattern rather than a one-off, and it is the reason the government keeps building capacity: a crop grown on seven estates, with a maintenance season in the middle of the year, leaves the whole country exposed when two or three of them slip at once.

Cane needs heat, flat ground and a great deal of water, which is why the estates sit where they do. Morogoro is the centre of the industry, with Kilombero, Mtibwa and Mkulazi. Kilimanjaro has TPC on the plain below the mountain, irrigated by its meltwater. Kagera has Kagera Sugar beside the river of the same name, and Pwani has Bagamoyo.

The Kilombero valley is also one of East Africa's great wetlands, a Ramsar site and a floodplain that feeds the Rufiji. Cane, rice and the wetland compete there for the same water and the same land — an argument that will outlast the current expansion.