At the tea auction in Mombasa, geopolitics is not an abstraction-It is a pricing factor and determines which buyers retreat from the market.
- •In November 2025, the country exported 52.38 million kilograms of tea, up nearly 12% from a year earlier.
- •Ten destinations account for 82.7% of Kenya’s monthly tea exports, and most of them are currently grappling with internal and external conflicts.
- •To alleviate the risks tied to traditional tea markets, Kenya has been targeting trade deals that would increase export volumes in markets like China, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Chad, and South Sudan.
The largest buyer is Pakistan, which absorbed 21.14 million kilograms of tea in November, just over 40% of the total exports that month.
Behind it came Egypt (5.15 million kgs), the United Kingdom (5.14 million kgs), Russia (2.87 million kgs), and Kazakhstan (2.64 million kgs). The rest of the top ten now reads like a maritime risk assessment map: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, India, Iran and Oman.
Taken together, these ten destinations account for 82.7% . Many now sit in, adjacent to, or economically exposed to the open conflict raging across the gulf.
Iran’s widening confrontation with regional rivals has included strikes beyond its borders and explicit threats to disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Even without a full closure, the risk premium on vessels entering or exiting the Gulf has risen. For Kenyan tea exporters, that translates into higher freight charges, steeper insurance costs, and longer transit times.
Iran is also a mega-consumer of Kenyan tea and a valuable export market. However, in 2024, Tehran suspended Kenyan tea imports after allegations that imported leaves were misrepresented and foreign currency misappropriated, cutting off roughly 86% of shipments to the country.
Read More about the license row that lost Kenya Iran as a tea market.
As joint Israeli and US strikes continue to batter the country's political foundation, negotiations to reopen the market for Kenyan tea remain in limbo and hundreds of smallholder farmers caught in uncertainty.
The UAE is not only a direct buyer of Kenyan tea; it is also a trading hub through which cargo is redistributed across the Middle East and Central Asia. Disruption there radiates outward. In retaliation to the killing of the Iranian political and military elite, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Tehran has turned most of its rage to Dubai — an important financial hub in the region.
Further south, instability around the Red Sea compounds the problem. Yemen, which imported 1.57 million kilograms of Kenyan tea in November, a dramatic year-on-year increase from 284,914 kilograms, sits astride one of the world’s most sensitive maritime corridors. Shipping lines wary of missile or drone attacks from the Iran-supported Houthis have already rerouted some vessels around the Cape of Good Hope. That adds weeks to journeys and thousands of dollars in cost per container. Tea, though light, travels in vast volumes and margins are not immune to such arithmetic.
Islamabad versus Kabul
The greatest vulnerability, however, lies to the east. Pakistan, Kenya’s single largest tea market by far, is now engaged in open hostilities with Afghanistan. Cross-border airstrikes and artillery exchanges have pushed the two neighbours into their most serious confrontation in years. Pakistan’s economy was fragile even before the fighting intensified and war will heighten currency pressure, fiscal strain, and the possibility of port or transport disruption.
A slowdown in consumption or difficulty in settling import bills would quickly echo back to the auction floors in Mombasa.
Afghanistan, though a smaller direct buyer of Kenyan tea, has historically imported significant volumes, often routed through regional trade corridors. Conflict along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border complicates those corridors. Formal trade can stall; informal flows can proliferate; but payments become harder to trace and insure.
The issues closer home
Elsewhere on the list, Egypt faces its own economic pressures, exacerbated by regional instability and higher import bills if shipping through the Suez corridor becomes more costly. Russia and Kazakhstan are tied into broader geopolitical tensions in Europe and the Asia minor, with sanctions regimes that can complicate banking and trade finance.
Sudan’s suspension of Kenyan tea imports, in place since March 2025, added a new layer of anxiety in the sector. The ban, enacted amid a diplomatic dispute over Kenya’s engagement with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), lopped off one of Nairobi’s top tea export destinations and erased millions in revenue. The country is still embroiled in its bloody civil war and there are no negotiations on sight to resolve the dispute.
Tea is Kenya's leading agricultural export and a cornerstone of many rural incomes. Globally, Kenya is the world’s largest exporter of black CTC tea and consistently ranks among the top three tea exporters by volume. Its competitive advantage rests on scale, reliability, and access to a wide range of markets.
Yet diversification in geography is less comforting when instability spreads across regions simultaneously. None of this guarantees a collapse in exports as the beverage is a staple in much of the Middle East, so demand is culturally entrenched and relatively inelastic.
Short-term supply disruptions from conflict could push Kenyan tea prices higher, but prolonged instability in key markets risks dampening demand, a glut in supply, and falling prices later. At the moment, global tea prices hover around US$3 per kilogram.
