Kenya has moved to open its sugar subsector to cheaper imports from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) after abandoning efforts to extend long-standing protectionist measures that have been in place for more than two decades, according to the news report by The EastAfrican.
The shift follows objections raised by some Comesa member states in October 2025 against prolonging tariff safeguards that have shielded Kenya’s sugar industry from regional competition. The safeguards were initially introduced to protect the less efficient local industry from cheaper imports while reforms were undertaken to boost competitiveness, reported Zawya.
According to the The EastAfrican news report, Kenya did not submit a request to extend the safeguards during the Comesa Council meeting held on December 4, 2025, effectively allowing the measures to lapse.
Kenya Sugar Board (KSB) chairman Nicholas Gumbo said the country would not pursue any further extensions, arguing that the original objective of building domestic capacity had largely been achieved. “You only need a safeguard if you don’t have adequate domestic capacity,” Mr Gumbo said. “The first safeguards were introduced more than 24 years ago to give Kenya time to build sufficient capacity to compete fairly with other Comesa countries. The last extension, granted in November 2023, was on the condition that there would be no further requests. From where we sit, we no longer need it.”
He added that leasing public sugar mills to private investors had significantly improved efficiency and supported Kenya’s drive towards self-sufficiency. “One of the remaining conditions for extending the safeguards was divestiture from public mills, and that has now been achieved following the leasing of the mills in May,” he said. “With these changes and two new mills expected to come on stream in March, I am confident we can attain domestic self-sufficiency within about two years.”
Comesa Assistant Secretary General for Administration and Finance Development Anand Haman said in October that Kenya’s repeated requests for safeguards had gone on for too long, causing discomfort among some member states. “Kenya is already on its seventh extension, and there are countries that have been against this,” Dr Haman said on October 1, noting that Kenya would have had to do considerable “convincing” to secure another extension.
On November 23, 2023, a Comesa Council meeting in Lusaka granted Kenya a final two-year extension to complete reforms aimed at making the sugar industry competitive ahead of full integration into the Comesa free trade regime. That seventh extension exceeded the five-year limit allowed under Comesa trade rules and expired in November 2025.
Major sugar-producing countries within Comesa include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eswatini, Malawi, Mauritius, Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Kenya has said it has made significant progress in sugar production and that any decision on seeking a reduced volume of duty-free imports would be based on updated data on output and deficits.
When Kenya joined the Comesa free trade area in 2000, sugar imports surged, severely affecting the domestic subsector. As a result, the country was granted safeguards that capped duty-free imports at 200,000 tonnes. Comesa later set conditions for liberalising the subsector, including privatisation of state-owned mills, diversification into ethanol and cogeneration, changes to cane payment formulas and expansion of production capacity.
Privatisation efforts were repeatedly stalled by court cases and political interference, prompting the government to adopt a leasing model instead. Kenya has since leased four major state-owned mills — Nzoia, Chemelil, Sony and Muhoroni — to private investors on 30-year terms. The arrangement is intended to attract private capital for modernisation, improve efficiency and ensure timely payments to farmers, while the government retains ownership and oversight.
The USDA notes that Kenya’s sugar sector continues to face structural deficits, with domestic production meeting only about 72 percent of consumption in 2024. Output is projected to decline by nearly 20 percent in 2025 to below 815,485 tonnes, largely due to lower extraction rates and premature cane harvesting.
