Zimbabwe ranks in the top ten producers of 6 commodities: platinum (#3, 11% of world output in 2025), lithium (#4, 9.7% of world output in 2025), palladium (#4, 7.8% of world output in 2025), tobacco (#5, 3.9% of world output in 2024), chromium (#6, 3.9% of world output in 2025), jute (#8, 0.1% of world output in 2024). It is a top-ten exporter of chromium (#3, 1.7% of world export value in 2024), tobacco (#3, 9.5% of world export value in 2024).
Share of world production, 2025. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
Zimbabwe's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Zimbabwe's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Zimbabwe dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Zimbabwe's own $1.6 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Tobacco alone is 85% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Zimbabwe 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.
Zimbabwe commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Zimbabwe is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Zimbabwe, computed from the same data as this page.
What Zimbabwe uses
Zimbabwe had about 16 million people and a food supply of 2,393 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 Zimbabwe, 2023
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Zimbabwe
Single-supplier markets. Zimbabwe buys half or more of its imports from one country in 1 of 1 import markets of $250 million or more, among them corn from South Africa (98%, $556 million). Import dependency.
How long Zimbabwe's own reserves would last
Lithium: Zimbabwe's reserves are about 18 years of its own output at the current rate (9.7% of world output, 1.4% of world reserves), against 128 years for the world.
Chromium: Zimbabwe's reserves are about 70 years of its own output at the current rate (3.9% of world output, 12% of world reserves), against 24 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.
Zimbabwe and critical minerals
The export controls register lists 4 measures imposed by Zimbabwe, of which 4 are 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 Zimbabwe produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/ZWE/ (CC BY 4.0).
Required. This site sets no cookies by default. It stores your answer here, your light or dark theme and any watchlist you build in your browser's local storage, on your device only. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts visits without cookies.
Accept all also lets Google Analytics set analytics cookies to count visits and improve the site, and lets Google AdSense run, which can set advertising cookies and show ads based on your browsing. Accept required keeps Google Analytics cookieless (it sets no cookies, but still sends Google an anonymous request when a page loads) and does not run AdSense, so no ads are loaded. Cookie details · Privacy policy