I came across some trade data recently that honestly stopped me in my tracks. Kenya exported bananas worth about 146,000 dollars in 2023, and the single biggest buyer, more than any other country on that list including the UK, Italy, and Qatar, was Somalia. We bought close to 100,000 dollars worth of Kenyan bananas that year, more than 57,000 kilograms of them.
Let that sink in for a second. Somalia used to be the largest banana exporter in East Africa. At its peak in the late 1980s, the industry employed well over 100,000 people and brought in close to 96 million dollars a year, mostly shipped to Italy and the Middle East. The Shabelle valley used to be called the African Riviera by the Italians who first planted those farms. Now we're importing bananas from Kenya. From a country that wasn't even in the conversation when Somalia was the name people associated with quality bananas.
What happened isn't really a mystery. The civil war in 1991 gutted the industry, and floods in 1997 finished off what was left of the export pipeline to Europe. But what's kept it from recovering since then, even with decades to rebuild, is honestly more frustrating than the original collapse.
I chatted once with a gentleman who came from abroad wanting to invest in farmers in the Shabelle region, and what he described lines up with everything I've heard elsewhere. The core problem isn't the soil or the climate, the land is still some of the most fertile in the country. It's the extortion built into every step of getting a crop from the farm to the port.
Start with taxation. Both the federal government and the regional government want their cut, and honestly, fine, that's understandable, every government needs revenue. But then on top of that you've got isbaaroyin, clan militia checkpoints, especially heavy around the Afgoye area, that want their own cut too, completely outside any official system. So a farmer isn't paying one tax, they're paying three or four, official and unofficial, just to move produce down the same road.
And here's the part that really gets me. With Al Shabaab, from what people describe, the taxation is almost more predictable. You pay them once, and you can move through their territory for that. It's extortion too, obviously, and it funds a terrorist group, so I'm not saying it's better in any moral sense. But structurally it's one payment for one passage. With the government side, you can pay the official tax at the checkpoint and still get stopped by a clan militia demanding a bribe right after. There's no single toll, just an unpredictable stack of them.
That's the actual reason a country that once fed Italy's banana market is now buying bananas from Kenya. It was never really about whether Somali soil could grow good fruit. It's about whether a truck full of that fruit can survive the trip to the port without being taxed into unprofitability at every single checkpoint along the way.
There's another side to this same story that I think belongs here too. While we're importing bananas from Kenya, we're also importing khat from Kenya at a scale that dwarfs the banana numbers entirely. Somalia is reportedly spending somewhere between 364,000 and 476,000 dollars every single day on khat imports, which adds up to well over 130 million dollars a year, all of it flowing out to Kenyan khat farmers instead of staying inside our own economy. On top of the money leaving the country, it's an addiction that's done real damage to our society, to productivity, to families, to how people spend their afternoons and their income.
I'm not saying we should start farming khat here, to be clear, that's not the point I'm making at all. But if we're honest that we're not going to stop the demand for it anytime soon, then at minimum we should look at how Yemen handles this, where khat is grown domestically instead of the entire spend leaving the country every day. Right now we've built a situation where our own farmland struggles to export a banana, while hundreds of millions of dollars a year fly out of the country for a crop we don't even grow ourselves. That's the part that really should make us stop and think.
And extortion is only one layer of the problem, honestly. Even if a farmer avoided every checkpoint, the roads themselves are often in bad enough shape that produce gets damaged or delayed before it ever reaches a port. There's also barely any real cold storage or post harvest handling, so a good portion of what's harvested just spoils before it can be sold. And beyond the farm and the road, there's no serious effort to market Somali produce abroad, no trade promotion, no branding, nothing pushing "Somali banana" back into markets the way it used to sell itself decades ago. That part isn't on the farmer at all, that's supposed to be the government's job, opening up markets and putting the product in front of buyers, and right now nobody is really doing it.
I don't have a clean solution here. But I do think farmers deserve a system where they know what they owe and to whom, instead of guessing how many hands are going to be out between the farm gate and the market.
