What does Indonesia produce and export?

Oil palm needs heat, more than 2,000 millimeters of rain a year and no dry season, which limits it to a narrow equatorial band. Indonesia sits squarely in it. Dutch colonial estates introduced the crop to Sumatra in the early twentieth century, and government transmigration schemes and smallholder credit from the 1980s pushed it across Sumatra and into Kalimantan on drained peat and cleared forest. Indonesia produced 59% of the world's palm oil in 2023 (FAOSTAT) and held 48% of world palm-oil export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). An export levy funds a domestic biodiesel blending mandate, so a rising share of the crop is burned at home rather than shipped, and the government has briefly banned exports outright to hold down cooking-oil prices.

Rubber came the same route in reverse. Hevea brasiliensis was taken from the Amazon to Southeast Asia through Kew Gardens in the 1870s, and the trees found better conditions and no leaf-blight fungus in Sumatra than in their homeland. Most groves are smallholder plots, tapped by hand. Indonesia grew 15% of the world's natural rubber in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and held 19% of world natural-rubber export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Cocoa, planted mainly in Sulawesi during a smallholder boom in the 1980s and 1990s, reached 12% of world production in 2024 (FAOSTAT), though aging trees and pod-borer damage have cut yields and the country now buys beans to feed its grinders, taking 6.6% of world cocoa import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Arabica in Aceh and the Toraja highlands and robusta in southern Sumatra gave 7.3% of world coffee production in 2024 (FAOSTAT).

Minerals show the policy most clearly. Indonesia mined 3.1% of world copper in 2025 (USGS), chiefly from Grasberg in the Papuan highlands, but held 8.0% of world copper export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI) because bans on raw ore exports forced smelters and refineries to be built at home, moving the country up the value chain.