Comoros Export Trade Data: $28.53M in 2023, Down 47.8%

India Leads a Small, Concentrated Buyer List

Comoros shipped $28.53 million worth of goods abroad in 2023, down 47.8% from $54.64 million the year before, the sharpest year-over-year pullback across the five years this dataset covers. India absorbed 25.3% of that total, worth $7.21 million, the largest single buyer for anything the archipelago exports, a relationship built primarily around India's demand for cloves and other spices. India's spice trade body describes the country as having transformed into a premier global hub for spice processing, importing raw spices from producing origins around the world for value addition before re-exporting them to markets elsewhere, a pattern that fits neatly with a small clove and vanilla producer like Comoros selling a meaningful share of its harvest to a large processing economy rather than to final consumer markets directly.

Indonesia ranked second at 19.1% ($5.45 million), and the United Arab Emirates followed at 14.7% ($4.19 million). Together, India, Indonesia, and the UAE, the top three buyers, account for 59.1% of total export value. France added 7.7% ($2.21 million), a legacy of Comoros' history as a French colony until 1975, Vietnam 6.3% ($1.80 million), Germany 5.8% ($1.66 million), the United States 4.6% ($1.30 million), the Netherlands 2.8% ($0.80 million), Pakistan 2.4% ($0.70 million), and Singapore rounded out the top ten at 1.7% ($0.50 million).

Cloves and Ylang-Ylang Define the Perfumed Islands

Coffee, tea, mate, and spices led all export categories in 2023, worth $24.99 million and accounting for 87.6% of total value, more than every other category combined. In practice this category is dominated by cloves and vanilla rather than coffee itself, since Comoros sits alongside Madagascar and Zanzibar as one of the main producers supplying the world's clove trade from the western Indian Ocean. Essential oils and resinoids, including perfumery and cosmetic preparations, ranked a distant second at 7.8% ($2.23 million). Reporting on the fragrance industry notes that Comoros is the world's top producer of ylang-ylang essential oil, with the archipelago producing between 30 and 40 tonnes a year mainly on the island of Anjouan, home to 350 small distilleries, and that the commodity has historically made up roughly one-tenth of total export revenues, a figure that lines up closely with what this category represents in the latest data. That same reporting describes the sector as facing growing strain from aging plantations, deforestation, and a shrinking pool of workers willing to do the painstaking work of hand-harvesting the flowers for wages of only about fifty euros a month.

Everything else on the list is small by comparison. Iron and steel added 1.1% ($0.33 million), animal and vegetable fats and oils 0.6% ($0.16 million), and electrical machinery a nearly identical 0.6% ($0.16 million). Ships, boats, and floating structures contributed 0.5% ($0.13 million), iron and steel articles 0.4% ($0.11 million), vehicles 0.3% ($0.08 million), miscellaneous edible preparations 0.3% ($0.07 million), and machinery and mechanical appliances rounded out the top ten at 0.2% ($0.06 million). None of these smaller categories comes close to challenging the dominance of spices and essential oils at the top of the list, underscoring just how narrow Comoros' formal export base really is once its two signature agricultural commodities are set aside.

A Volatile Trade History Tied to a Handful of Harvests

Comoros' export total has swung sharply from year to year. It stood at $48.96 million in 2019, fell to $20.68 million in 2020 as the pandemic disrupted shipping and demand, recovered to $34.22 million in 2021, climbed to a five-year high of $54.64 million in 2022, and then fell sharply again, down 47.8%, to $28.53 million in 2023.

Given how small the absolute dollar figures are and how concentrated the export base is in just a couple of agricultural commodities, swings of this size are far easier to produce than they would be for a larger, more diversified exporter: a strong or weak clove and vanilla harvest, or the timing of a handful of large shipments crossing into a new calendar year, can move the entire national total by tens of percentage points, making single-year comparisons a poor guide to any underlying trend without also looking at the surrounding years for context. For a closer look at how individual partner countries or product categories break down year over year, the data panels above provide the full detail behind these figures.