Tanzania’s avocado exports are booming but much of the fruit goes to waste

Avocados have been grown in Tanzania since the early 1890s. The global appetite for the creamy fruit, also known as green gold, is booming. The industry’s market value was over US$6.5 billion in 2020, reached US$16.24 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$23 billion in 2029.

Tanzania has seized this opportunity in the last two decades and is now Africa’s fourth-largest avocado exporter, behind Kenya, South Africa and Morocco.

The top destinations for Tanzania’s avocados are Europe (40%), India (30%) and the Middle East (19%). Tanzania’s avocado exports increased from 1,393 tons, valued at US$1.9 million in 2013, to 36,520 tons, valued at US$79.813 million, in 2024.

For my PhD research, I followed Tanzanian avocados from the farms through to local markets and packhouses for export. The research aimed to uncover the underlying structures, relationships and systems that cause food waste in Tanzania’s avocado trade. I knew avocados were being wasted so I set out to uncover why this was happening and who carried the heaviest cost.

The farmers, farmer associations and commercial packhouses managers that I interviewed said that in Tanzania’s domestic avocado production sector, up to 40% of the avocados overall were wasted because of damage to the fruits and pests or diseases. In the export avocado sector, we found 30%-50% losses for smallholders...

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