Chile ranks in the top ten producers of 10 commodities: copper (#1, 23% of world output in 2025), rhenium (#1, 37% of world output in 2025), molybdenum (#2, 16% of world output in 2025), lithium (#3, 19% of world output in 2025), hazelnuts (#5, 6% of world output in 2024), silver (#5, 5.4% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of copper (#1, 29% of world export value in 2024), lithium (#1, 73% of world export value in 2024), molybdenum (#1, 24% of world export value in 2024), grapes (#2, 10% of world export value in 2024), hazelnuts (#2, 10% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2025. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
The Nazca plate slides beneath South America along the Chilean coast, and the melting that follows has repeatedly pushed hot, fluid-rich magma into the crust. Where those fluids cooled, they left copper spread thinly through enormous volumes of altered rock: porphyry deposits, low in grade but vast, and shallow enough to be mined by open pit. Chuquicamata has been worked since 1915, El Teniente since the nineteenth century, and Escondida, found in 1981 under barren gravel with no surface trace, became the largest copper mine in the world. Chile mined 23% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS) and held 29% of world copper export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest share of any country.
Ownership has swung twice. Foreign companies developed the mines in the early twentieth century; the nationalization of 1971 created the state producer Codelco, which still holds the largest deposits; and a foreign investment framework written in 1974 brought private capital back for everything found since. The result is a divided industry in which a state company and international miners work the same geology under different rules, and in which royalty and tax debates recur whenever the metal price rises.
The Atacama makes the mines both cheap and constrained. Almost no rain falls, so pits stay dry and ore is easy to move, but there is no water for the concentrators that grind and float sulfide ore. Mines desalinate seawater and pump it more than two kilometers uphill, an energy cost that rises as pits deepen and grades fall. Some deposits avoid milling altogether by leaching oxide ore in heaps and plating cathode directly on site, which is why part of Chile's exports leave as refined metal and part as concentrate for smelters in Asia. Energy is the other constraint: Chile has almost no hydrocarbons of its own, and after Argentine pipeline gas was cut in the mid-2000s it built terminals to import natural gas as a liquid, alongside imported crude oil and fuel for the mining fleet.
Chile's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Chile's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Chile dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Chile's own $45 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Copper alone is 69% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Chile compares with other countries.
Molybdenum: #4, 10% of world imports, $817.3 million (2024)
Sources: FAOSTAT (crops and livestock), USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (minerals), Energy Institute Statistical Review (energy) for production; CEPII BACI for trade. Ranks count only the commodities on this site.
Chile commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Chile is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Chile, computed from the same data as this page.
What Chile uses
Chile had about 20 million people and a food supply of 3,057 kilocalories per person a day in FAO's 2023 food balance sheets. Its eight largest supplies among the commodities tracked there:
Largest domestic supplies of tracked commodities in Chile, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Chile
Single-supplier markets. Chile buys half or more of its imports from one country in 6 of 12 import markets of $250 million or more, among them molybdenum from Peru (80%, $817 million); coal from Colombia (66%, $695 million); corn from Argentina (91%, $580 million); steel from China (51%, $363 million); pork from Brazil (84%, $323 million); chicken from Brazil (84%, $283 million). Import dependency.
A new largest supplier. crude oil: Brazil (70% in 2022) to Argentina (46% in 2024). Supplier shifts.
Suppliers gaining. Argentina in crude oil (2.4% to 46%, +44 points).
How long Chile's own reserves would last
Copper: Chile's reserves are about 34 years of its own output at the current rate (23% of world output, 18% of world reserves), against 43 years for the world.
Lithium: Chile's reserves are about 164 years of its own output at the current rate (19% of world output, 25% of world reserves), against 128 years for the world.
Molybdenum: Chile's reserves are about 62 years of its own output at the current rate (16% of world output, 15% of world reserves), against 66 years for the world.
Silver: Chile's reserves are about 24 years of its own output at the current rate (5.4% of world output, 5.4% of world reserves), against 23 years for the world.
USGS national reserve figures, rounded. A short national figure usually reflects how little has been proved up, not when mining stops. See country reserve life.
Chile and critical minerals
Chile is the largest producer of 2 minerals on a US or EU critical list, each at 20% or more of world output: rhenium (37%, 2025), copper (23%, 2025). Source: the concentration report on USGS, FAOSTAT and Energy Institute production.
Downloads and citation
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does Chile produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/CHL/ (CC BY 4.0).
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