Iran ranks in the top ten producers of 21 commodities: strontium (#1, 56% of world output in 2025), feldspar (#3, 13% of world output in 2025), natural gas (#3, 6.3% of world output in 2025), pistachios (#3, 23% of world output in 2024), dates (#4, 12% of world output in 2024), crude oil (#5, 5.2% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of pistachios (#2, 14% of world export value in 2024), dates (#5, 7.7% of world export value in 2024), almonds (#9, 0.8% of world export value in 2024).
Share of world production, 2025. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
Oil in the Middle East began in Iran. A concession granted in 1901 led to the discovery at Masjed Soleyman in 1908, in the folded Zagros belt where anticlines of porous limestone trap oil beneath the surface in structures large enough to see from the air. The industry was nationalized in 1951, an act that set the pattern for producing states everywhere. Iran produced 5.2% of the world's crude oil in 2025 (Energy Institute). Its export trade does not match that share, because sanctions have for years limited which buyers will take Iranian barrels and at what discount, and shipments move through intermediaries rather than through the open market that the trade statistics capture.
Gas is the larger resource and the more constrained one. South Pars, the Iranian portion of a single enormous reservoir in the Gulf shared with Qatar, holds one of the largest concentrations of gas anywhere. Iran produced 6.3% of the world's natural gas in 2025 (Energy Institute), yet almost none of it is liquefied for export, because building liquefaction plants requires technology and capital that sanctions have kept out. The gas is therefore consumed domestically: burned for power and winter heating, reinjected into oilfields to maintain pressure, and converted into ammonia, urea and methanol.
The same cheap gas explains the steel industry. Iran reduces iron ore with natural gas rather than smelting it with coke, a route that suits a country with abundant gas and no coking coal, and it is among the largest producers of directly reduced iron in the world. The ore comes from Chadormalu, Gol-e-Gohar and other magnetite deposits in the central desert, concentrated and pelletized near the mines. Iran mined 3.7% of the world's iron ore in 2025 (USGS), nearly all of it consumed by domestic mills rather than shipped, which is why the country appears among the largest miners but not among the ore exporters.
Iran's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Iran's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Iran dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Iran's own $2.5 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Iron ore alone is 45% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Iran compares with other countries.
Silk: #10, 1.6% of world imports, $5.8 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.
Iran commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Iran is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Iran, computed from the same data as this page.
What Iran uses
Iran had about 91 million people and a food supply of 2,875 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 Iran, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Iran
Single-supplier markets. Iran buys half or more of its imports from one country in 6 of 6 import markets of $250 million or more, among them soybeans from Brazil (75%, $1.1 billion); corn from Brazil (86%, $1.1 billion); rice from India (100%, $701 million); gold from China (98%, $497 million); sugar from Brazil (99%, $422 million); palm oil from Malaysia (100%, $366 million). Import dependency.
Suppliers gaining. India in rice (61% to 100%, +39 points); Brazil in corn (48% to 86%, +38 points).
How long Iran's own reserves would last
Barite: Iran's reserves are about 333 years of its own output at the current rate (3.4% of world output, 25% of world reserves), against 46 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.
Iran and critical minerals
Iran is the largest producer of 1 mineral on a US or EU critical list, each at 20% or more of world output: strontium (56%, 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 Iran produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/IRN/ (CC BY 4.0).
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