What does Iraq produce and export?

The giant fields of southern Iraq — Rumaila, West Qurna, Majnoon, Zubair — lie in a foreland basin where the Arabian plate dips beneath the Zagros mountains, and they hold oil in thick, permeable reservoirs at moderate depth. Wells there flow at high rates for low cost. Kirkuk in the north, found in 1927, was the field that made Iraq an oil state; the southern cluster is what makes it a large one. Iraq produced 4.4% of the world's crude oil in 2025 (Energy Institute) and held 7.4% of world crude export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).

How that oil is developed is unusual. After the auctions of 2009, international companies signed technical service contracts that pay a fixed fee for each barrel produced above a baseline, rather than giving them a share of the oil itself. The state keeps the reserves and the price risk; the contractors carry no exposure to the market, which limits their appetite for spending when the fee is squeezed. Nearly all exports leave through offshore terminals at the head of the Gulf, so a small number of single-point moorings and the depth of the Shatt al-Arab channel determine how much can physically be sold. The northern route, a pipeline through Turkey to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, has repeatedly been shut by war, sabotage and legal disputes over who may sell Kurdish oil.

Gas is the other side of the ledger. Iraq produces large volumes of natural gas dissolved in its oil, but has never built enough gathering and processing capacity to use it, so much of it is flared while the country imports gas and electricity from Iran to run its power stations. Capturing that associated gas is the single largest available gain in its energy balance.

Agriculture has moved the other way. The Tigris and Euphrates carry less water than they did, upstream dams have cut the flow, and soils in the irrigated south have grown steadily saltier, which has reduced the grain and rice harvests of a region that invented irrigated farming. A public distribution system supplies subsidized flour, rice and cooking oil to households, and much of what it hands out is bought abroad: Iraq took 4.2% of world rice import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), alongside large purchases of wheat.