Thailand ranks in the top ten producers of 16 commodities: natural rubber (#1, 32% of world output in 2024), cassava (#3, 8.4% of world output in 2024), palm kernel oil (#3, 3.7% of world output in 2023), palm oil (#3, 4.2% of world output in 2023), sugar (#3, 5.5% of world output in 2023), fishmeal (#5, 5.6% of world output in 2024) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of antimony (#1, 29% of world export value in 2024), mangoes (#1, 18% of world export value in 2024), natural rubber (#1, 30% of world export value in 2024), cassava (#2, 15% of world export value in 2024), palm kernel oil (#2, 14% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2024. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
The southern peninsula has no real dry season, which is what rubber trees need to be tapped through most of the year. Estates were planted from the early twentieth century, but the industry became a smallholder one: several million growers with a few hectares each, replanting subsidized by a levy on exports, selling latex and sheet to local dealers who bulk it into standard grades. Thailand produced 32% of the world's natural rubber in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and held 30% of world natural-rubber export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest share of any country, most of it heading to tire plants in China, Japan and the United States.
Rice comes from the flat, flood-fed central plain and the northeast. Canal building under royal direction from the late nineteenth century turned the Chao Phraya delta into an export granary, and Thai millers later built a reputation for long-grain quality and, in the fragrant jasmine varieties of the northeast, for a premium cultivar that cannot be grown identically elsewhere. Thailand grew 4.1% of the world's rice in 2024 (FAOSTAT) but took 17% of world rice export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Policy has swung the trade sharply: a pledging scheme that bought rice from farmers well above the market price between 2011 and 2014 accumulated stockpiles so large that releasing them depressed world prices for years afterward.
Cane and palm fill the rest of the export list. Sugar mills in the northeastern provinces work under a quota system that divides output between the domestic market and export, restructured after 2018 when the pricing arrangements were challenged at the World Trade Organization; Thailand produced 5.5% of world sugar in 2023 (FAOSTAT) and held 5.8% of world sugar export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Oil palm in the southern provinces gave 4.2% of world palm oil production in 2023 (FAOSTAT), nearly all of it consumed at home or blended into biodiesel rather than exported. Feed for a large poultry and shrimp industry explains why the country bought 2.2% of world soybean import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).
Thailand's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Thailand's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Thailand dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Thailand's own $30.5 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Gold alone is 27% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Thailand compares with other countries.
Cassava: #1, 18% of world imports, $623.7 million (2024)
Antimony: #2, 17% of world imports, $81.4 million (2024)
Silicon: #4, 7.8% of world imports, $315 million (2024)
Pepper: #5, 4.2% of world imports, $256.5 million (2024)
Urea: #5, 4.5% of world imports, $921.8 million (2024)
Soybeans: #6, 2.2% of world imports, $1.8 billion (2024)
Cashews: #7, 0.3% of world imports, $9.2 million (2024)
Fishmeal: #7, 2.7% of world imports, $255.2 million (2024)
Apples: #10, 3% of world imports, $245.6 million (2024)
Crude oil: #10, 2.4% of world imports, $32.3 billion (2024)
Gold: #10, 2.4% of world imports, $14.1 billion (2024)
Potash: #10, 1.6% of world imports, $327.8 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.
Thailand commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Thailand is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Thailand, computed from the same data as this page.
What Thailand uses
Thailand had about 72 million people and a food supply of 2,855 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 Thailand, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Thailand
Single-supplier markets. Thailand buys half or more of its imports from one country in 10 of 22 import markets of $250 million or more, among them soybeans from Brazil (84%, $1.8 billion); steel from Japan (75%, $1.7 billion); coal from Indonesia (72%, $1.4 billion); cassava from Laos (64%, $624 million); corn from Myanmar (78%, $572 million); milk from New Zealand (61%, $432 million). Import dependency.
A new largest supplier. gold: Switzerland (45% in 2022) to Hong Kong (37% in 2024); natural gas: Myanmar (19% in 2022) to Qatar (22% in 2024). Supplier shifts.
Downloads and citation
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does Thailand produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/THA/ (CC BY 4.0).
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