What does Uzbekistan produce and export?

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.