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.

Kenya exported more tea in 2025 than at any point in its history — and earned less for it than the year before. While Sri Lanka earns nearly double per kilogram and Rwanda commands a higher unit price at Kenya’s own auction, the world’s largest black tea exporter by volume is shipping more to make less. Add the loss of Iran and Sudan, an ongoing war that has blocked eight million kilograms at Mombasa port, a new Tea Levy that makes Kenyan tea more expensive than its competitors, and a KTDA bonus season that left smallholder farmers in the Rift Valley with payments 30% below the prior year — and a structural crisis comes into focus.

Africa posted record coffee exports in 2024/25 and Ethiopia and Uganda are shipping at volumes the continent has never seen. The price that made these records possible has now turned. A Brazil-led global surplus of 7 to 10 million bags is bearing down on Arabica futures, EUDR compliance is arriving in December, and East Africa’s producers are about to discover how different the market looks on the descent.

A convergence of record import volumes, geopolitical shocks across the Middle East, U.S. tariff uncertainty, and chronic currency weakness is testing the structural resilience of Africa’s grain supply chain as Q2 2026 unfolds — exposing a continent that remains, at its core, dependent on corridors it does not control.