A Kilimokwanza analysis of the 2026/27 budget estimates

There is a number buried in the 2026/27 budget speech of the Ministry of Industry and Trade that ought to be read aloud in every district that grows cashew. Of the 617,680 tonnes of raw cashew nuts Tanzania produced in 2025/26, the country’s processing factories shelled just 53,125 tonnes by April 2026. That is 8.6 per cent. The remaining nine-tenths of the crop left the country exactly as it was harvested — raw, unprocessed, and carrying with it the jobs and the margin that shelling, grading and packaging would have kept on Tanzanian soil.

That single statistic is the clearest expression of a theme that runs, often unspoken, through all three of the season’s agriculture-linked budgets: the value-addition gap. Tanzania has become very good at growing things and adequate at selling them abroad. What it has not yet built, at anything like the necessary scale, is the middle — the processing layer that converts a raw commodity into a finished good before it crosses the border.

A production success that exposes a processing problem

The scale of the gap is, paradoxically, a measure of agricultural success. The Ministry of Agriculture’s 2026/27 speech reports food crop production rising from about 17.1 million tonnes in 2021/22 to roughly 23.8 million tonnes in 2024/25 — an increase of nearly 39 per cent — lifting national food self-sufficiency to around 130 per cent. The sector grew 4.1 per cent in 2024 and contributed 26.3 per cent of national output. The budget itself has quadrupled and more, from TZS 294 billion in 2021/22 to the TZS 1.106 trillion requested for 2026/27.

All of that produces a surplus. And a surplus is only as valuable as a country’s ability to do something with it. Sold raw, a tonne of cashew, sesame or maize earns a commodity price set elsewhere. Processed, the same tonne earns a manufactured price, employs people through the shelling and packing line, and builds an export brand. The difference between those two outcomes is the value-addition gap — and on the evidence of the cashew figures, Tanzania is currently surrendering most of it.

The same pattern, sector by sector

What makes this a theme rather than a single crop’s misfortune is how consistently it recurs once you look for it.

In livestock, the picture is more encouraging but the principle is identical. The Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries reports more than 101 million litres of milk processed and meat output up 4.4 per cent, with beef approaching 690,000 tonnes. Processing milk into longer-life, higher-value dairy products, and channelling meat through formal abattoirs and cold chains, is value addition by another name. The expansion of milk collection and processing centres is real progress — but it sits against a national herd that yields far more than is currently captured in processed form.

In fisheries, the gap appears as a deficit rather than a surplus. The 2026/27 catch of around 526,763 tonnes falls well short of estimated national demand of about 1.25 million tonnes a year. Part of that gap is a wild-capture limit; part of it is a processing, preservation and cold-chain limit. The ministry’s Blue Economy push — cage farming, seaweed and sea-cucumber culture, aquaculture infrastructure — is, at its core, an attempt to add both volume and value to a chain that currently loses too much of its catch to spoilage and informality.

And in industry and trade, the gap is the explicit subject. Of Tanzania’s 70 cashew-processing factories, 50 are operational and 16 stand idle — several because their machinery is worn out or their technology has been overtaken. Installed capacity is about 108,549 tonnes a year; actual throughput barely half of that. The ministry’s remedy — six new plants built in 2025/26 and planned capacity in Mtwara for up to 153,600 tonnes of raw nuts — is moving in the right direction. But the arithmetic is sobering: even that planned expansion would still leave the majority of a 617,680-tonne crop unprocessed.

Why the gap persists — and why the budgets matter

The value-addition gap is not a mystery of intent. Every one of the three speeches expresses the ambition to process more at home. The gap persists because processing capacity is expensive, slow to build, and — on the evidence of the numbers — under-resourced relative to the production it is meant to absorb.

This is where the budgets themselves become part of the story. The Ministry of Industry and Trade, whose mandate covers the entire processing-and-markets end of the chain, is requesting TZS 137.8 billion for 2026/27 — and of that, only about TZS 33.7 billion is development spending, with the larger share going to recurrent costs and salaries. Compare that with the TZS 1.106 trillion flowing into the field through the Agriculture vote. The country is investing heavily in growing more and comparatively little in turning what it grows into finished goods. The value-addition gap is, in part, a budgeting gap.

None of this argues for spending less on production. Food self-sufficiency is hard-won and worth defending. The argument is about proportion and sequencing: a food system that can already feed itself 1.3 times over needs, as its next frontier, the capacity to capture the value of what it produces rather than ship it out raw.

The test for the year ahead

The honest measure of the 2026/27 budgets will not be the tonnage grown — that battle is increasingly being won — but the share of that tonnage that gains value before it leaves the country. For cashew, the benchmark is brutally simple: does locally processed volume climb out of single digits? For dairy and meat, does the processed share of the national herd’s output rise? For fisheries, does the Blue Economy close the deficit or merely chronicle it?

Tanzania’s farmers, herders and fishers are producing more than ever. The unfinished task — the one these three budgets only partly fund — is making sure the value of that production stays at home. Until a far greater share of the cashew crop is shelled in Mtwara rather than Mumbai, the value-addition gap will remain the most important number in the agriculture budget that the agriculture budget does not itself contain.