Colombia’s Exports Jumped 19%. It Shipped 18% Less Oil.

Trade

Colombia exports rose by more than nineteen percent in May, the kind of number a finance minister repeats. The same release records that the country shipped eighteen percent less crude oil.

Both statements come from the national statistics office. Reconciling them tells you what is actually happening to the Colombian economy.

Colombia exports more money and fewer barrels

The fuels and extractive group earned two thousand three hundred million dollars in May, a third more than a year earlier. Yet the volume of crude leaving the country fell to eleven point four million barrels.

Divide one by the other and the implied price per barrel rose by well over sixty percent. Every extra dollar came from the market, not from the wellhead.

The pattern is not new. According to the statistics office’s own export series, fuel export values also jumped by more than forty-six percent in April, when they made up over forty-five percent of everything sold abroad.

Two consecutive months of surging fuel receipts, then, on a shrinking barrel count. The country is being paid more for producing less.

Javier Díaz, who heads the exporters’ association, put it plainly. Oil prices are far higher than a year ago, and the other star performer was gold.

Strip out fuels and gold and the picture inverts

Over the first five months Colombia sold twenty-three and a half billion dollars abroad, up fifteen percent. Fuels contributed nine and a half billion of that, a full forty percent of the total.

Non-monetary gold added a further three and a half billion, having more than doubled. Together those two lines account for more than fifty-five percent of everything the country sells.

Now remove both and rerun the sum. What remains of Colombian exports is roughly one percent smaller than it was a year ago.

That calculation assumes gold roughly doubled, which the statistics office describes as more than a doubling. The direction survives any reasonable adjustment.

The official figures agree in spirit. Farm and food exports fell by one percent, manufactures by nearly two and a half.

The currency is doing the damage

Díaz named the culprit for the farm side. Coffee and cocoa have been hurt by the appreciation of the peso, which shrinks every dollar of revenue once converted at home.

That strength is not accidental. The central bank has lifted its policy rate to twelve percent, and a real return of nearly six points draws foreign money into pesos.

So the tool deployed against inflation is quietly taxing the exporters least exposed to it. Coffee earnings of two billion dollars now barely exceed coal at two billion.

For a country whose national brand rests on a coffee bean, that is a sentence worth rereading.

There were exceptions. Cut flowers rose almost twenty-five percent in May and coffee extracts and concentrates by nearly ninety, showing that processed goods can outrun the exchange rate.

The raw bean cannot. It is sold in dollars on a world market and converted into an ever stronger peso.

What the destinations reveal

The United States remains the largest buyer, taking about twenty-nine percent of the year’s exports. Italy climbed sharply on gold and crude purchases.

Panama, India, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands follow well behind. The buyer list is short, and the top of it is a single trading partner facing its own tariff quarrel with the region.

China moved the other way. Its purchases of Colombian crude fell to nothing, subtracting almost two points from the country’s overall export growth.

Read alongside the energy numbers, the picture sharpens uncomfortably. Colombia is earning more for less oil while importing about a third of the gas it burns.

The government suspended new exploration contracts in 2022, and the production trajectory reflects it. Gold is filling part of the gap, but a mine is not a manufacturing base.

A high oil price flatters the accounts of a country with a shrinking hydrocarbon base. Should crude soften, the arithmetic that produced this cheerful headline runs entirely in reverse.

How much did Colombia exports grow?

Exports reached five thousand one hundred and ninety-three million dollars in May, a rise of just over nineteen percent against the same month of 2025.

Is the growth real or a price effect?

Largely a price effect. Crude shipments fell by eighteen percent in volume even as the value of fuel exports rose by a third.

Which sectors are shrinking?

Farm exports and manufactures both declined over the year to May, with unroasted coffee and cocoa beans the weakest performers.