Kazakhstan ranks in the top ten producers of 17 commodities: linseed (#2, 25% of world output in 2024), chromium (#3, 14% of world output in 2025), tungsten (#3, 2.8% of world output in 2025), barite (#4, 8% of world output in 2025), lentils (#4, 5.8% of world output in 2024), bismuth (#5, 1.1% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of beryllium (#1, 89% of world export value in 2024), linseed (#2, 19% of world export value in 2024), chromium (#5, 1.4% of world export value in 2024), lentils (#7, 2.6% of world export value in 2024), barite (#8, 3.1% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2024. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
The Kazakh shield carries ore bodies that have been worked for a very long time. Copper at Zhezkazgan, held in sandstone beds rather than in the porphyries that supply most of the world, was mined in the Bronze Age and industrialized under Soviet planning, with smelters and refineries built beside the mines and whole cities built beside those. Newer open pits at Aktogay and Bozshakol in the east are conventional porphyry deposits developed since 2015. Kazakhstan mined 3.1% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS) and held 3.0% of world copper export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), most of it refined cathode sent to China and Europe. Gold, much of it a byproduct of the same base-metal operations plus dedicated mines in the north and east, reached 3.9% of world production in 2025 (USGS). Zinc, lead and coal come out of the same industrial belt.
Oil is the larger business and the harder logistics problem. The supergiant Tengiz field, found in 1979 near the northeastern shore of the Caspian, and Kashagan, in the shallow, freezing, sour-gas-bearing waters offshore, hold very large volumes of crude oil that has no coastline of its own to leave from. The overwhelming share of exports travels north on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium line to Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast, which makes Kazakh output hostage to a single route; alternatives across the Caspian by tanker to Baku, and east to China by pipeline, carry a fraction of the volume.
Farming is a story of one campaign. The Virgin Lands program from 1954 ploughed tens of millions of hectares of northern steppe for wheat, on soils that are fertile but dry, with yields that swing with a short, unreliable rainy season. The grain still moves out by rail through Russia or south into Central Asia. Irrigated cotton in the far south, along the Syr Darya on canals that helped drain the Aral Sea, gave 1.3% of world cotton production in 2023 (FAOSTAT).
What does Kazakhstan produce?
Commodities where Kazakhstan is a top-ten producer
Kazakhstan's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Kazakhstan's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Kazakhstan dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Kazakhstan's own $56.3 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Crude oil alone is 64% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Kazakhstan compares with other countries.
Commodities where Kazakhstan is a top-ten exporter
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.
Kazakhstan commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Kazakhstan is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Kazakhstan, computed from the same data as this page.
What Kazakhstan uses
Kazakhstan had about 20 million people and a food supply of 3,136 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 Kazakhstan, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Kazakhstan
Single-supplier markets. Kazakhstan buys half or more of its imports from one country in 4 of 4 import markets of $250 million or more, among them natural gas from Russia (81%, $772 million); gold from Russia (100%, $541 million); wheat from Russia (100%, $381 million); sugar from Russia (93%, $297 million). Import dependency.
How long Kazakhstan's own reserves would last
Chromium: Kazakhstan's reserves are about 33 years of its own output at the current rate (14% of world output, 19% of world reserves), against 24 years for the world.
Barite: Kazakhstan's reserves are about 121 years of its own output at the current rate (8% of world output, 21% of world reserves), against 46 years for the world.
Gold: Kazakhstan's reserves are about 18 years of its own output at the current rate (3.9% of world output, 3.5% of world reserves), against 20 years for the world.
Copper: Kazakhstan's reserves are about 28 years of its own output at the current rate (3.1% of world output, 2% of world reserves), against 43 years for the world.
Zinc: Kazakhstan's reserves are about 21 years of its own output at the current rate (2.8% of world output, 3.1% of world reserves), against 18 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.
Kazakhstan and critical minerals
The export controls register lists 1 measure imposed by Kazakhstan, of which 1 is 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 Kazakhstan produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/KAZ/ (CC BY 4.0).
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