What does DR Congo produce and export?

DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) sits on the northern half of the Central African Copperbelt, a sedimentary basin where copper and cobalt were deposited in ancient shallow-marine rocks and later concentrated by weathering. The grades are the point: ore in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga often runs several times the copper content of the porphyry deposits that supply most of the world, and it carries cobalt as a byproduct, which is why one province supplies most of the world's cobalt without setting out to. The country mined 14% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS), second only to Chile.

Industrial mining there is more than a century old. A Belgian colonial company opened the Katanga mines in 1906 and built the smelters, railways and company towns around them; the state successor that inherited them in the 1960s collapsed in the 1990s along with the national power grid, and output fell to almost nothing. Recovery came through foreign joint ventures from the mid-2000s, much of it Chinese, including an infrastructure-for-minerals agreement signed in 2008. Artisanal diggers work the same orebodies by hand alongside the mechanized pits, and the same informality applies to gold, mined in the east and moved across borders largely outside official statistics.

Everything then has to leave a landlocked province. Copper cathode and concentrate travel by truck south through Zambia to Durban or east to Dar es Salaam, journeys of several weeks over congested border posts, or west on the rehabilitated Lobito railway to the Angolan coast. Power is the other constraint: hydroelectric capacity on the Congo and Lualaba rivers is large on paper but unreliable, so smelters and refineries import electricity from Zambia and Southern Africa or run on diesel, and processing capacity has lagged behind mine output. The country's other commodity history is agricultural: the Congo basin carried the world's largest colonial oil palm concessions from 1911, and the plantations that produced palm oil for European soap makers survive only in fragments.