Ukraine ranks in the top ten producers of 11 commodities: sunflower oil (#2, 27% of world output in 2023), potatoes (#3, 5.4% of world output in 2024), corn (#6, 2.2% of world output in 2024), linseed (#7, 2.2% of world output in 2024), canola (#8, 4.1% of world output in 2024), barley (#9, 3.7% of world output in 2024) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of sunflower oil (#1, 28% of world export value in 2024), canola (#3, 14% of world export value in 2024), corn (#4, 12% of world export value in 2024), honey (#5, 7.1% of world export value in 2024), wheat (#5, 8.3% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2023. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
The chernozem belt that runs across Ukraine is a soil type formed under thousands of years of steppe grassland: a meter or more of dark, humus-rich earth that holds water and needs little fertilizer to give good yields. It is the reason the region fed the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, and the reason grain remains the country's largest export business rather than a subsistence crop. Ukraine grew 2.8% of the world's wheat in 2024 (FAOSTAT) but held 8.3% of world wheat export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), and produced 2.2% of world corn in 2024 (FAOSTAT) while taking 12% of world corn export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). The gap between the production and export shares is the point: the domestic market is small relative to the harvest, so most of the crop is sold abroad, mainly into North Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.
Sunflower is the specialty. Soviet plant breeders spent decades raising the oil content of the seed, and the crop suits a dry continental summer better than most oilseeds do. Ukraine produced 27% of the world's sunflower oil in 2023 (FAOSTAT) and held 28% of world sunflower-oil export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest share of any country. Crushing plants sit near the fields and the oil, not the seed, is what leaves. Rapeseed and barley follow the same route, and soybeans accounted for 1.7% of world soybean export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).
Everything depends on the sea. Odesa, Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk handle deep-draft bulk vessels; the alternatives, rail into the European Union on a different track gauge and barges down the Danube, cost several times as much per tonne and cannot carry the volume. The full-scale invasion of 2022 closed the ports, and the corridor arrangements and later unilateral routes that reopened them determined how much of each harvest could actually be sold. The same war reaches heavy industry: the banded iron formations at Kryvyi Rih, mined since the nineteenth century to feed Soviet steel mills, gave 2.0% of world iron ore production in 2025 (USGS) and 1.8% of world iron-ore export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).
Ukraine's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Ukraine's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Ukraine dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Ukraine's own $25.9 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Corn alone is 22% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Ukraine 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.
Ukraine commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Ukraine is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Ukraine, computed from the same data as this page.
What Ukraine uses
Ukraine had about 38 million people and a food supply of 2,786 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 Ukraine, 2023
FAO reports a negative domestic supply for Ukraine's sorghum (−12 thousand tonnes; production 42 thousand tonnes, imports 0 tonnes, exports 56 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.
Who supplies Ukraine
Single-supplier markets. Ukraine buys half or more of its imports from one country in 1 of 4 import markets of $250 million or more, among them steel from Turkey (Türkiye) (66%, $259 million). Import dependency.
How long Ukraine's own reserves would last
Titanium: Ukraine's reserves are about 30 years of its own output at the current rate (2.1% of world output, 1.2% of world reserves), against 53 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.
Ukraine and critical minerals
The export controls register lists 1 measure imposed by Ukraine, 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 Ukraine produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/UKR/ (CC BY 4.0).
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