What one row of the trade table holds
On the platform, the fertiliser trade dataset is a table of exporter declarations. Each row is one month, one customs heading and one destination market, and the destination markets are Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. Quantity is tonnes of product. Value is US dollars declared free on board at the exporter's port, and the two together give a declared value per tonne. That is fertilizer imports into East Africa as this dataset sees them: what the sending side said it loaded, not what a customs officer at Mombasa or Dar es Salaam cleared, and certainly not what a distributor later sold.
Five headings carry the volume: nitrogen, phosphate, potash, animal or vegetable fertilisers (the organic line), and a mixed heading that holds the compound products. Diammonium phosphate, monoammonium phosphate and the NPK blends all sit under mixed, not under phosphate. That matters, because DAP is the planting fertiliser most readers have in mind. Filter on phosphate expecting to find it and you will land on a small residual line. Classification follows the heading as declared. Nothing gets reclassified by nutrient content, and the mixed heading is not split into component products.
Free on board sits a long way upstream of a retail bag. It is the price at the ship's rail in the exporting country, before ocean freight, insurance, port handling, inland transport and duty. Freshness runs one to three months behind the calendar, and recent months are revised upward as late reporters file. The page for fertilizer import and trade data lists the fields and headings. What follows walks through the latest twelve months and marks where the table deserves less trust than its tidy columns suggest.
Twelve months, counted by heading
From August 2025 to July 2026, the platform's trade data holds 723,996 tonnes declared by exporting countries as shipped to the four markets combined. Mixed, which has DAP and NPK inside it, accounts for 368,335 tonnes, or 51 percent. Nitrogen fertilisers come next at 209,261 tonnes, 29 percent. Potash is 72,306 tonnes and phosphate 64,994 tonnes, 10 and 9 percent. Organic, the animal or vegetable line, is 9,100 tonnes. That is 1 percent, a rounding error.
Read the phosphate line with that classification in mind. Nine percent looks low for a region where planting fertiliser is overwhelmingly a phosphate-bearing compound. Then you remember that compounds live under mixed. What remains under phosphate is the straight products: single superphosphate, triple superphosphate and similar. Anyone who wants a figure for phosphorus entering the region cannot get it from this table without nutrient coefficients the table does not carry.
Mixed deserves the same caution in reverse. Half the tonnage sitting under one label is a lot of hidden variety. A tonne of DAP and a tonne of a low-analysis NPK blend share a row and a unit, and declared value is the only field that hints at what the mix contained. These are product tonnes, not nutrient tonnes. The headline split is a customs split, not an agronomic one.
Declared value per tonne turns the ranking upside down
Value changes the picture. Over the same twelve months, the platform's trade data gives declared values, free on board at the exporter's port, of 716 US dollars per tonne for the mixed heading, 594 for phosphate, 620 for organic, 361 for potash and 322 for nitrogen. Nitrogen supplies 29 percent of the volume and is the cheapest tonne by a distance.
Put volume and value together and mixed dominates even harder. Multiply 368,335 tonnes by 716 dollars and the mixed line comes to roughly 263.7 million dollars at the exporter's port. Nitrogen, 209,261 tonnes at 322 dollars, comes to roughly 67.4 million. So mixed carries about 1.8 times nitrogen's tonnage (368,335 divided by 209,261) but close to four times its declared value (263.7 divided by 67.4 is about 3.9). A lender sizing import finance for the region, or an analyst asking where the foreign exchange goes, should be looking at the compound heading, not at urea.
Look at potash and phosphate side by side. Potash is bigger by tonnes, 72,306 against 64,994, but cheaper by value, 361 against 594 dollars. Multiply those through and the two lines sit closer in dollars than in tonnes: potash at roughly 26.1 million, phosphate at roughly 38.6 million. Rank headings by volume and you get one order; rank them by value and you get the opposite. Both readers would be right about what they measured.
Organic is the figure to distrust. At 620 dollars per tonne it sits above phosphate and nearly double nitrogen. That is not impossible for processed organic products, but it rests on 9,100 tonnes. Small headings give unstable unit values, since one unusual shipment moves the average. Nothing in the dataset flags a per-tonne figure built on thin volume. The honest rule belongs to the reader: the fewer the tonnes under a heading, the less weight the unit value deserves.
One more limit. These are declared values, and declaration carries its own incentives on both sides of a border. A dataset of declarations cannot tell an under-declared cargo from a cheap one. If a per-tonne figure drops sharply in one month, look at the row; do not announce a price fall. Declared value is not a market price either. It is an average over whatever mix of products and contracts exporters happened to load that month, and a shift in the mix will move it even when no single product's price changes.
Two countries take nearly everything, and Rwanda's figure looks wrong
Split the same twelve months by destination and four markets become two. In the platform's trade data, Kenya stands at 366,149 tonnes and Tanzania at 341,020. Add them and you get 707,169 tonnes. Against the regional total of 723,996, that is about 98 percent. Uganda is declared at 13,328 tonnes. Rwanda is declared at 3,500 tonnes.
Rwanda at 3,500 tonnes is not the figure a reader would expect, and it should not be read as Rwanda's fertiliser supply. Destination here means the market the exporter declared, and Rwanda has no port. The International Fertilizer Development Center's note on fertilizer logistics in East Africa sets out that importers in landlocked Rwanda or Burundi bring fertiliser in through Mombasa or Dar es Salaam. Port costings and inland logistics decide the choice. A cargo that will end up in Kigali may well be declared by the exporter as shipped to Kenya or Tanzania, because that is where the ship stops. Uganda's 13,328 tonnes invite the same reading.
Nothing in the dataset confirms this. There is no transit flag, no final-destination field and no re-export row. So the most that can be said is that the Kenya and Tanzania totals very probably contain tonnes bound inland, and the Uganda and Rwanda totals very probably undercount what those countries received. How much is unknowable from this table. A user who needs Rwandan supply has to go to a national source or an apparent consumption estimate. They should not subtract anything from the Kenyan figure to get there.
Be equally careful with the Kenya and Tanzania rows, for the opposite reason. Kenya's 366,149 tonnes is not Kenyan consumption. It is not even Kenyan imports in the customs sense; it is what exporters said they sent to Kenya, and part of that may have been on a truck to Kampala or Kigali within weeks. An analyst comparing Kenya against Tanzania as fertiliser markets, rather than as gateways, is comparing two numbers that each carry an unknown share of someone else's demand. Only the same IFDC note's observation that port choice turns on distance, road quality and port infrastructure explains why that share might shift between the two from one year to the next.
What the country split does answer cleanly is which markets exporters name on their paperwork. That also shows which coastal gateways the regional trade is organised around. For a trader or a logistics analyst, that is a real question. For anyone studying fertiliser availability in Uganda or Rwanda, it is the wrong table. Better to say so than to publish 3,500 tonnes as a national import figure.
Why the latest months keep moving after publication
One to three months behind is fast for trade data, and you pay for that speed with revisions. Countries file at their own pace. So the newest month lands with some reporters still missing, then fills in as they catch up. Revisions go one way: a recent month almost never loses tonnes, it gains them. Put the latest month against the same month a year earlier and you are setting a provisional figure beside a settled one. That gap will close on its own as filings arrive. Note the extraction date on every pull, and read the last three months as a band, not a line.
It helps to see how the slower, official track handles the same material. A report on the joint East Africa fertilizer technical working group meeting covers a workshop in Kampala on 16 and 17 July 2024, where Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda validated their 2023 fertiliser trade data before working out apparent consumption. Calendar year 2023, checked in the middle of 2024. That is what a reconciled national figure costs. This table is a different instrument: exporter declarations, monthly, short lag, no reconciliation step. Its use is showing direction and composition months before the validated figure exists, as long as the reader keeps the word provisional attached until it does.
From the exporter's port to a landed cost
Free on board stops at the exporter's rail. For the most useful published figures on what happens after that, go to the same IFDC logistics note already cited. It puts the 2021 freight cost for a mid-size or large handysize fertiliser vessel of 25,000 to 35,000 tonnes deadweight at about 25 to 30 US dollars per tonne from the Middle East to East Africa. By the first quarter of 2022 that rate was up 48 percent, with Baltic to East Africa rates up 50 to 60 percent over the same window. The same note gives around 50 dollars per tonne to move fertiliser from international markets to Kenya, and 92 dollars per tonne to move it inland from there.
Set those against the platform's declared values and the proportions are striking. One caveat first: the freight figures are from 2021 and 2022 and the values from August 2025 to July 2026, so this is an illustration of scale, not a landed-cost calculation. Fifty dollars on a nitrogen tonne declared at 322 dollars is about 16 percent (50 divided by 322). An inland leg of 92 dollars is about 29 percent of the same tonne. On a mixed tonne at 716 dollars those same two legs are about 7 and 13 percent. Cheap product carries freight badly. A truck costs the same whatever is in the bags.
Further along the corridor, the Food Security Portal's summary of how fertiliser trade contributes to food security in Africa reports that shipping from Mombasa to Kigali can add 45 percent to retail fertiliser prices. That is a retail effect, measured in a different place and a different unit from anything in the trade table. You cannot chain it onto a declared value to produce a Kigali price. What it does do is explain why a Rwandan user cares about the dataset's Kenyan rows at all. Tonnes declared to Kenya are, in part, the start of that corridor.
Questions to take to a different dataset
This table answers how many product tonnes exporters declared to each of four markets, under which heading, at what declared value, by month. Everything else is a question for another table. It is worth being blunt about which ones.
It is not a retail price. Declared value is free on board at a foreign port, in dollars, per tonne of undifferentiated product. A shelf price in shillings per bag of a named grade is several steps and several margins away from that. For shelf prices, the market price table is where to go. The earlier post on commodity data from East Africa worked through how that table is stitched together, including the fact that fertiliser is recorded at market level in 29 Kenyan counties, with only a handful carrying a fresh price in any week. East Africa market prices by month is the companion to pull alongside the trade rows if pass-through is the question.
It is not consumption either. Apparent consumption needs imports, exports, production and stock change reconciled, which is exactly what the Kampala workshop was doing for 2023. This table carries only the first of those, and only as declared from abroad. It is not a nutrient balance, for the reasons the heading section gave. Nor is it a policy record: the FAO brief Focus on fertilizers notes that governments imposed export controls, import duties and foreign currency controls. Measures like those turn up here as unexplained volume shifts with no flag attached.
None of this is a forecast. What the platform serves is arithmetic on observations, nothing more. It doesn't touch the farm side either. Field-level weather and soil rows come from NuaSense's own sensor network and sit in separate tables, with no join to trade. A tonne declared to Mombasa tells you nothing about soil moisture anywhere.
Reading four countries against the continental series
Twelve months is a small window. The temptation is to read that table against the continental fertiliser literature as though the two measured the same thing. Mostly they don't.
A CGIAR paper on the role of fertilizer trade in enhancing food security in Africa reports East Africa's share of the continent's fertiliser use climbing from 17 percent in 2000 to 33 percent in 2023, which makes it the second-largest using region. But that is a consumption share across a wider East Africa over 23 years. This table is product shipments to four named markets over one year. Consistent in spirit, incomparable in arithmetic.
The Food Security Portal summary gives sub-Saharan Africa an average of 22.3 kilograms per hectare of fertiliser application in 2018, against a global average of 139. Nitrogen is the most applied nutrient in Africa at 63 percent of total use, urea the most widely used product, and inorganic fertiliser use fell 14 percent in 2022 after the Russia and Ukraine conflict. Set that 63 percent beside the 29 percent that nitrogen fertilisers take in the four-country trade table and the gap looks like a contradiction. It isn't. One figure is a share of nutrient use across the whole continent. The other is a share of product tonnes declared to four markets, where much of the nitrogen arriving does so inside DAP and NPK, under the mixed heading. Different unit, different geography, different year. The same summary's record of Africa as a net fertiliser exporter, with a 2023 trade surplus of 5.8 billion US dollars, sits beside a four-country import table of 723,996 tonnes without strain: that surplus is anchored in Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria, and East Africa's row in the ledger is an importing one.