[qwanta]

I'm interested in making some charts that show the flow of commodities between countries/continents. Here is an example of the kind of thing I am interested in generating:



(taken from "Energies", by Vaclav Smil)


Does anyone know where to find country export/import data for commodities such as base metals (copper, aluminum, lead, zinc...) strategic/minor metals (cobalt, chromium, manganese...) precious metals (gold, silver, palladium..) 'soft' commodities (coffee, sugar...) grains (wheat, barley, corn, rice...)?

The USGS site has some good data on world metal mine production for example, but I'm drawing a bit of a blank in terms of export/import numbers. It seems the data is only available in expensive reports geared towards investors (similar to the petroconsultants oil database).

If anyone's ever looked into this kind of thing, or has commodity trading experience, I'd be interested to know, thanks!

[MonteQuest]

Try here; CIA World Factbook

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

[qwanta]

Thanks, I'm familiar with the CIA factbook; unfortunately the data is a bit too general to make these maps...

The best I've found so far is this:
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/comtrade/mr/rfCommoditiesList.aspx
(in case anyone's interested)