DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) ranks in the top ten producers of 7 commodities: cobalt (#1, 74% of world output in 2025), tantalum (#1, 52% of world output in 2025), cassava (#2, 14% of world output in 2024), copper (#2, 14% of world output in 2025), plantains (#2, 11% of world output in 2024), niobium (#3, 0.9% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of cobalt (#1, 65% of world export value in 2024).
Share of world production, 2025. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) sits on the northern half of the Central African Copperbelt, a sedimentary basin where copper and cobalt were deposited in ancient shallow-marine rocks and later concentrated by weathering. The grades are the point: ore in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga often runs several times the copper content of the porphyry deposits that supply most of the world, and it carries cobalt as a byproduct, which is why one province supplies most of the world's cobalt without setting out to. The country mined 14% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS), second only to Chile.
Industrial mining there is more than a century old. A Belgian colonial company opened the Katanga mines in 1906 and built the smelters, railways and company towns around them; the state successor that inherited them in the 1960s collapsed in the 1990s along with the national power grid, and output fell to almost nothing. Recovery came through foreign joint ventures from the mid-2000s, much of it Chinese, including an infrastructure-for-minerals agreement signed in 2008. Artisanal diggers work the same orebodies by hand alongside the mechanized pits, and the same informality applies to gold, mined in the east and moved across borders largely outside official statistics.
Everything then has to leave a landlocked province. Copper cathode and concentrate travel by truck south through Zambia to Durban or east to Dar es Salaam, journeys of several weeks over congested border posts, or west on the rehabilitated Lobito railway to the Angolan coast. Power is the other constraint: hydroelectric capacity on the Congo and Lualaba rivers is large on paper but unreliable, so smelters and refineries import electricity from Zambia and Southern Africa or run on diesel, and processing capacity has lagged behind mine output. The country's other commodity history is agricultural: the Congo basin carried the world's largest colonial oil palm concessions from 1911, and the plantations that produced palm oil for European soap makers survive only in fragments.
DR Congo's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of DR Congo's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity DR Congo dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of DR Congo's own $6.4 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Cobalt alone is 47% of it. See the full export dependency report for how DR Congo compares with other countries.
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.
DR Congo commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where DR Congo is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about DR Congo, computed from the same data as this page.
What DR Congo uses
DR Congo had about 106 million people and a food supply of 2,015 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 DR Congo, 2023
FAO reports a negative domestic supply for DR Congo's cocoa (−2 thousand tonnes; production 35 thousand tonnes, imports 3 thousand tonnes, exports 40 thousand tonnes), meaning exports exceed production plus imports in the year. These are not counted as use and are left out of the table above.
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
How long DR Congo's own reserves would last
Cobalt: DR Congo's reserves are about 26 years of its own output at the current rate (74% of world output, 50% of world reserves), against 39 years for the world.
Copper: DR Congo's reserves are about 25 years of its own output at the current rate (14% of world output, 8.2% of world reserves), against 43 years for the world.
Tin: DR Congo's reserves are about 3 years of its own output at the current rate (9.3% of world output, 1.5% of world reserves), against 21 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.
DR Congo and critical minerals
DR Congo is the largest producer of 2 minerals on a US or EU critical list, each at 20% or more of world output: cobalt (74%, 2025), tantalum (52%, 2025). Source: the concentration report on USGS, FAOSTAT and Energy Institute production.
The export controls register lists 4 measures imposed by DR Congo, of which 2 are in force, suspended or scheduled as of the register's date.
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does DR Congo produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/COD/ (CC BY 4.0).
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