Eastern Africa (excluding intra-trade) Industrial monocarboxylic fatty acids; acid oils from refining Export quantity

Eastern Africa (excluding intra-trade) Industrial monocarboxylic fatty acids; acid oils from refining Export quantity: Key Points

• In 2023, Eastern Africa (excluding intra-trade)'s industrial monocarboxylic fatty acids; acid oils from refining export quantity stood at 4.07K tonnes — up from 3.15K tonnes in 2014, a rise of roughly 29%.
• 2016: caves in to 1.41K tonnes (-60%).
• 2018: collapses to 598.81 tonnes (-62%).
• 2019: leaps to 1.80K tonnes (+201%).
• 2023: shoots up to 4.07K tonnes (+146%).
• 2023: Series wraps up at 4.07K tonnes, a net 29.4% gain across the whole run.

What Broke Global Trade In 2020

A series that moves both ways like this is telling you the underlying driver isn't fixed — conditions are shifting, or the indicator itself is sensitive to short-term noise.

The scale of this drop matches what happened to trade worldwide in 2020, as the pandemic disrupted both the supply side and the demand side of trade at once.

Worth pairing this with the same indicator for a handful of comparable economies before concluding anything about Eastern Africa (excluding intra-trade) specifically — a move that looks large here can be the regional norm, or genuinely unusual, and this chart alone can't say which.

Worth remembering this isn't a live feed — it's Eastern Africa (excluding intra-trade)'s periodically-updated official statistics, with the usual lag and modeling that comes with any indicator series like this.

This is a small trade volume in absolute terms — at this scale, a single shipment, buyer, or contract can move the national total by a large percentage. Don't read year-to-year swings here as an economy-wide signal.