Kenya’s poultry sector looks, on paper, like one of the region’s more modern livestock industries — organised integrators, branded day-old chicks, commercial feed mills. In practice, it is one of the most financially fragile: a single input line, feed, determines whether an entire production cycle turns a profit, and the sector’s biggest competitive threats come not from disease or drought but from trade policy on two fronts at once.

Kenya produces more camel milk than any country on Earth, yet loses half of it before it reaches a buyer. Ethiopia sends camels north to Sudan and Egypt on a corridor where prices have historically outrun every other livestock species. As drought reshapes East African rangelands, the camel economy is where climate adaptation and commodity opportunity meet.

Beef is the single largest earner within Kenya’s livestock economy, contributing an average of 65% of total earnings from livestock and livestock products. Pastoral and agro-pastoral systems — concentrated in the arid and semi-arid lands where roughly 36% of Kenya’s population lives — hold about 70% of the national cattle herd and generate some 76% of the total value of beef production. This is a herd economy built by mobile pastoralists, not feedlots.

Tanzania’s cotton output has rebounded 48%. Kenya’s GM cotton revolution is scaling. Ethiopia is exporting garments at $420 million a year. The raw production numbers look encouraging — but East Africa still ships predominantly raw lint while Asia and Europe capture the margin at every subsequent stage of the textile supply chain. The recovery is real. The structural problem is older and harder.