The global honey trade

Two markets wearing the same name

There is a commodity market and a premium market, and almost everything confusing about honey pricing comes from treating them as one. The commodity market moves bulk honey in drums, priced per tonne, bought by packers, blended to a target colour and flavour, and sold as own-brand honey. The premium market sells identified honey — a floral source, a region, a producer — at multiples of the commodity price.

A beekeeper selling into the first is a price-taker in a global commodity market. A beekeeper selling into the second is selling a story that has to be true, and the machinery of origin labelling, monofloral standards and authenticity testing exists because the difference in price makes lying profitable.

The shape of the flow

• Production is concentrated in a small number of large countries — China alone produced about 445,000 tonnes in 2024 by FAO's figures, followed by India, Türkiye, Ethiopia and Iran — and exports are concentrated further still, led by China, India, Ukraine and Argentina.
• Consumption is concentrated in the European Union, the United States, Japan and the Gulf, which import far more than they produce.
• Honey crosses borders in bulk drums, is blended at destination, and is sold under a brand that may have no relationship to any single apiary.
• Premium flows run separately and in smaller volumes — New Zealand manuka, European protected-origin honeys, single-origin and single-floral lines.

Who produces the most

World honey production in FAO's figures rose from about 1.26 million tonnes in 2000 to about 1.99 million in 2024, while the quantity exported rose faster — from about 374,000 tonnes to about 828,000, roughly two-fifths of reported production by 2024 against under a third in 2000. More of the world's honey now crosses a border before it is eaten. The 2024 world figure is itself an FAO estimate.

FAOSTAT has no 2024 figure for Romania, Greece or Poland, each a sizeable producer in the year before; they are named beside the ranking rather than dropped from it or ranked as producing nothing. Of the 121 national production figures FAOSTAT holds for 2024, 50 are official returns and the rest FAO estimates or imputations.

The continents are FAO's own aggregates, which include its estimates for countries that did not report, and they are the one FAO grouping in which every country is counted once — so they add up to the world. They are not the same as the world regions HoneyHQ's atlas uses: FAO treats the Americas as one continent, for example. Neither the world nor a continent is ever rebuilt here by adding up countries.

Production over time, without cherry-picking

Over the decade to 2024, reported world production rose by about 13%. China's figure has been roughly flat since the mid-2010s, at about 445,000 tonnes in 2024 against 462,000 in 2014, while India's rose from about 62,000 tonnes in 2014 — an FAO imputation — to 146,000. When one end of a comparison is an estimate, part of the change may be in the estimate rather than in the honey.

Two end years say nothing about the years between, so the table gives three points and the gaps, and the chart above the table shows the decade's change for every large producer. No growth rate is computed through missing years, no percentage is given from a tiny base, and a country whose figure is missing is not treated as having stopped.

Does more colonies mean more honey?

Between 2000 and 2024 FAO's world hive count rose by about 46% and world honey production by about 58%. That is two statistics moving in the same direction, not proof that one drives the other: weather, forage, management, the mix of countries and how each counts its hives all sit between them. A count of hives is a number of boxes, not a measure of how strong or healthy the colonies in them are.

Dividing a country's honey production by its hive count gives reported production per reported hive — HoneyHQ's arithmetic, not an FAO statistic, and not what a beekeeper harvests from a colony. It is meaningful only where both figures describe the same beekeeping. Ukraine's official hive count of about 2,200 against 53,000 tonnes of honey in 2024 shows the two series can describe entirely different things, so the quotient is not computed there.

Who exports, and why volume and value rank differently

By weight, the largest exporters are China, India, Ukraine and Argentina. By value the list changes: New Zealand, nineteenth by weight in 2024, was second by value, its honey declared at about $23 a kilogram against China's $1.56. Vietnam falls from fifth by weight to eleventh by value. Largest producer, largest exporter and most valuable exporter are three different questions.

The United States is by far the largest importer, at about 255,000 tonnes against about 61,000 tonnes of its own production in 2024.

The US's own production has been falling. The USDA recorded 116 million pounds in 2025, the lowest in the series shown here, from 2.41 million honey-producing colonies in 2025 at 48 pounds a colony, down from 157 million pounds in 2019. The average price rose to $3.05 a pound in 2025 from $2.41 in 2024.

What a trade unit value is, and is not

Divide what customs recorded for a country's honey exports by the quantity, for the same country and year, and you have a trade unit value: the average declared value of a kilogram leaving the border. It mixes bulk drums with jars, cheap honey with expensive, and it is in that year's dollars. It is not the retail price, the wholesale price or what beekeepers were paid, and a higher one is not a sign of better honey.

The world export unit value rose from about $1.17 a kilogram in 2000 to over $3 through the 2010s and stood at $2.75 in 2024 — in nominal dollars, with no adjustment for inflation, so the later figures buy less than they appear to. Germany shows what a unit value can hide: it imported honey at about $3.14 a kilogram in 2024 and exported at about $5.70, consistent with a country that packs and blends honey for sale on, though one average cannot show that directly.

Tiny quantities make unit values meaningless. Guyana's exports were 1.66 tonnes in 2024, declared at $541,000 — $326 a kilogram — which says something about one consignment and nothing about honey. HoneyHQ does not compute a unit value below 100 t, or where the quantity is zero or missing, and every derived number on the site is declared with its denominator in the table below.

Net trade is not consumption

Exports minus imports is a physical balance at the border. It is not what a country eats: stocks carried from one year to the next, honey imported, blended and sent on, and differences between how production and trade are recorded all sit between them. Ukraine's net exports of about 86,000 tonnes in 2024 exceeded its reported production of about 53,000; Vietnam's 45,000 tonnes in 2024 compares with 25,000. Statistics that do not reconcile are a question about the statistics, not evidence about the honey.

The exporting country is not always the origin

Trade statistics record the country a consignment left, not where the bees made the honey. Belgium exported about 27,000 tonnes of honey in 2024 while importing about 38,000 and holding no production figure in FAOSTAT at all; much of what it sends on arrived from elsewhere first. Honey can be imported, blended, packed and re-exported, sometimes more than once, and transhipment through a third country can disguise where it was harvested — which is why origin labelling rests on traceability documents and testing rather than on customs data.

Odd numbers are questions, not proof

Price differences create the incentive for honey fraud: a high-value product, a much cheaper substitute in syrup, and a long supply chain in which honey from many producers is mixed. Where syrup-adulterated honey enters the market it competes on price with real honey, which damages honest producers even when consumers never notice.

Trade data can flag where to look — an unusually low declared value, exports that outrun production, a sudden new route. It cannot show that any consignment was adulterated or mislabelled, and HoneyHQ does not read it that way about any country or company. That takes testing of the honey itself, and the authenticity guide explains which tests can detect what.

What sets the price a beekeeper gets

1. 1The world bulk priceSet by global supply against packer demand. A large harvest anywhere depresses it everywhere, which is why a good season locally can coincide with a bad year financially.
2. 2Colour and flavourPackers blend to a consistent product, so honey is graded and priced partly on how useful it is in a blend rather than on how good it is.
3. 3Cheap competing supplyAdulterated honey sold as pure undercuts real honey on price — fraud damages honest producers whether or not anyone notices.
4. 4Any premium the seller can proveFloral source, region, protected name or certification. Each is worth money only to the extent it can be verified, which is why testing and traceability are commercial infrastructure rather than consumer protection alone. HoneyHQ holds no source that measures the premium a protected name earns, so none is quoted.

Few public statistics show any of these prices directly. Some countries publish a producer price — the USDA's average price per pound is one — and customs records give unit values at the border. Wholesale prices are commercial data, and shelf prices vary jar by jar; neither has a comparable official series on this site.

How the statistics are kept

• Every value keeps FAO's flag: official, FAO estimate, imputed, missing or from another organisation. Estimates are drawn hollow or hatched and labelled in the tables.
• A missing value is never a zero, and a ranking names the countries it could not rank.
• World and continental totals are FAO's own aggregates. Sub-regions, the European Union and development groupings overlap them and are never added to them.
• Where a state divided within the years held, the series are not joined: Serbia and Montenegro to 2005, then Serbia and Montenegro separately; Sudan (former) to 2011, then Sudan. The USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia divided before 2000, where the data begins.
• FAOSTAT 'China, mainland' excludes Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, which are reported separately.
• FAO revises past years. The figures here were extracted on 29 September 2026, and the date is printed beneath every table.
• Money is in nominal US dollars as declared, with no inflation adjustment and no conversion into other currencies.

The smallholder end

For a great many of the world's beekeepers this is not an industry at all but a livelihood component — hives kept alongside farming, sold locally or to a buyer whose reliability matters more than the price. HoneyHQ's records on the miombo bark-hive economy and on forest honey livelihoods describe that end, and the finding that recurs there is worth carrying into any discussion of price: a dependable buyer changes household outcomes more than a high price does.