The Spices of Zanzibar

Zanzibar has a great potential for developing agriculture, taking into account its comparative advantage of having good soils and rainfalls to support crop production. The great diversity of marine macro flora and fauna species and a variety of forest resources provides unique opportunity for the islands to fairly taking a lead in fulfilling the demand for domestic and export market of farm products, especially fruits and spices at the regional and international horizon.

For about 400 years, Zanzibar and Pemba, its smaller sister, have been known as “spice islands”. Zanzibar is known all over the world for production of high quality organic cloves. Up to 1990s and many years before that, Zanzibar was well known for the production of large quantity of cloves; more than 6000 tons of cloves used to be produced annually. 

The Zanzibar State Trading Corporation (ZSTC) exports majority of the cloves and has recently signed an memorandum of understanding (MoU) with GANEFRYD, a Danish company, which wants to import organic cloves and other selected spices to Europe.

The Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar has in recent years strived to put in place a favourable macro-economic policy environment for promotion of public and private investment in the agriculture sector by forming the Zanzibar Agricultural Transformation Initiative(ZATI)

Zanzibar Agricultural Transformation Initiative(ZATI) will emphasise on up scaling ongoing efforts to rehabilitate and establish small scale irrigation structures, storage facilities including cold storage for fish and livestock products, rural feeder roads and soil conservation schemes. These initiatives can be supported by special targeted cash or food for work programs.