Uzbekistan ranks in the top ten producers of 9 commodities: silk (#3, 6.5% of world output in 2024), jute (#4, 0.5% of world output in 2024), rhenium (#5, 8.6% of world output in 2025), tellurium (#5, 1.8% of world output in 2025), cotton (#7, 3.3% of world output in 2023), indium (#8, 0.1% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of uranium (#3, 3% of world export value in 2024), silk (#5, 4% of world export value in 2024), potash (#9, 2.7% of world export value in 2024).
Share of world production, 2024. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
Cotton in Central Asia is entirely a matter of diverted water. The crop needs a long hot summer, which the region has, and far more water than falls there, which it does not. From the 1950s Soviet planners cut canals from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya into the desert to irrigate cotton on a scale intended to make the union independent of imports. The rivers that had fed the Aral Sea no longer reached it, and the sea shrank to a fraction of its former area, leaving salt flats where fishing ports had been. It is among the largest environmental changes ever produced deliberately. Uzbekistan grew 3.3% of the world's cotton in 2023 (FAOSTAT).
What happens to that fiber changed twice. Under the Soviet system and for decades after independence the state set procurement quotas at prices below the market and mobilized students and public employees for the harvest, a practice that led international buyers to boycott Uzbek cotton from 2010. The quota system was abolished in 2020 and the harvest mechanized and paid at market rates, and at the same time the government pushed production into vertically integrated clusters that gin, spin and weave inside the country. The result is that a significant cotton grower barely appears in the raw-fiber export tables at all: the crop leaves as yarn, fabric and garments rather than as bales.
Minerals follow a similar logic of processing at home. Muruntau, an open pit in the Kyzylkum desert developed after its discovery in 1958, is among the largest gold mines in the world, and the state producer refines the metal and sells much of it to the central bank rather than into the export market. Uzbekistan produced 3.9% of the world's gold in 2025 (USGS). Gas from the Bukhara and Ustyurt regions supplied the Soviet grid and later flowed east to China through a Central Asian pipeline, but domestic demand for power, heating and fertilizer has grown faster than output, and the country has moved from selling natural gas to buying it from Russia.
What does Uzbekistan produce?
Commodities where Uzbekistan is a top-ten producer
Uzbekistan's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Uzbekistan's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Uzbekistan dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Uzbekistan's own $11 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Gold alone is 88% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Uzbekistan compares with other countries.
Commodities where Uzbekistan 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.
Uzbekistan commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Uzbekistan is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Uzbekistan, computed from the same data as this page.
What Uzbekistan uses
Uzbekistan had about 36 million people and a food supply of 3,297 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 Uzbekistan, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Uzbekistan
Single-supplier markets. Uzbekistan buys half or more of its imports from one country in 7 of 7 import markets of $250 million or more, among them natural gas from Russia (55%, $1.7 billion); steel from Russia (73%, $676 million); sugar from Brazil (58%, $650 million); wheat from Kazakhstan (99%, $592 million); sawnwood from Russia (82%, $425 million); crude oil from Russia (80%, $356 million). Import dependency.
How long Uzbekistan's own reserves would last
Gold: Uzbekistan's reserves are about 17 years of its own output at the current rate (3.9% of world output, 3.3% of world reserves), against 20 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.
Downloads and citation
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does Uzbekistan produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/UZB/ (CC BY 4.0).
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