Top 50 Countries by Phosphate Rock Mine Production, 2025

Why the Ranking Looks Like This: Regions, Industry Links, and Trade Exposure

The distribution is not “random geology”: phosphate mining is dominated by a small set of basins that combine large reserves, workable ore grades, and infrastructure that can move bulk rock into fertilizer and chemical value chains. In practice, global supply separates into three broad groups: mega-producers (China and Morocco), a strategic second tier (United States, Russia, Peru, Jordan, Saudi Arabia), and a long tail of regional suppliers.

A key pattern is the MENA corridor: Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Israel, and (in smaller volumes) Syria and Algeria appear in the producer list. This matters because many importing regions are simultaneously large fertilizer consumers, so trade flows can tighten quickly when logistics or policy constraints emerge. Another visible cluster is Latin America (Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela), where production often supports domestic fertilizer demand but can also become an export buffer depending on local processing capacity and transport costs.

The “long tail” producers are economically important at national scale even when global volumes are small (for example, island production such as Christmas Island or Nauru, and smaller volumes in Finland, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, or Zimbabwe). These entries are useful for understanding regional import dependence: Europe’s agricultural system, for instance, is far more exposed to imported phosphate inputs than the mine geography alone would suggest.

Table 2 lists every country with a reported 2023 production value in the underlying global compilation (34 producers). Values shown as ≈ reflect estimated or provisional figures.

The scatter usually produces two takeaways. First, high production appears in both middle-income and high-income contexts: large output is possible when deposits are high-quality and infrastructure is in place, regardless of income level. Second, some of the most important exporters sit in a narrow income band but have outsized leverage because phosphate rock is bulky and costly to substitute quickly. That combination tends to amplify the role of logistics (ports, rail, energy costs) and policy (royalties, export rules, fertilizer subsidies) in shaping real-world availability.