These basic goods used in commerce are being traded everyday around the world. Let's take a look at the most common marketable items produced to satisfy our needs. Let's start with rice. A worker climbs a pile of rice bags inside a National Food Authority warehouse in the Philippines. Rice prices were up 17.3 percent in January over the previous year, according to the Wholesale Price Index.
Romeo Ranoco/Files/Reuters
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Nickel
A worker displays nickel ore in a ferronickel smelter in Indonesia. The country accounts for roughly 7 percent of the world's total nickel mine output, according to Reuters data.
Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters
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Gold
Melted gold flows into a mold of a 1-kilogram bar at a plant owned by Argor-Heraeus SA in southern Switzerland. The plant processes 350-400 tons of gold per year. About 2,500 tons of gold is mined globally every year.
Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters
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Gold
Trays of gold powders are displayed at a factory in Kanagawa, Japan. The factory produces gold products for industrial and commercial use and recycles gold from jewelry and industrial scrap. While much of the world's gold is used for jewelry, the precious metal has many industrial and medical uses.
Michael Caronna/Reuters
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Tea
Workers pick tea leaves at a plantation in China. The country produces more than 30 percent of the world's supply of tea. More than 4.5 million tons of tea is produced globally every year.
Kevin Zhao/Reuters
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Coffee
Dew drops from coffee beans at a plantation in Costa Rica. Due to its reputation for producing premium coffee, a sack of Costa Rica-grown beans sell for about $40 more per sack than competing varieties on the international market. By law, only Arabica coffee may be grown in Costa Rica.
Reuters
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Salt
Mountains of salt are shown on Bonaire Island in the Caribbean. In addition to its use as flavoring and a preservative for food, salt is a major industrial chemical. The United States is the largest producer of sodium chloride in the world.
Rex Features
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Gold
Gold miners form a human chain while digging in an open pit mine in northeastern Congo. Conflict in Congo has been driven for more than a decade by the violent struggle for control over the country's vast natural resources -- including gold, diamonds and timber -- most of which are exploited using manual labor.
Finbarr OReilly/Reuters
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Gold
A tray of gold granules and a pair of tongs are pictured at a gold factory in Japan. Since 1999, the price of gold has risen an average of 15% a year. It peaked at nearly $1,900 in 2011 at the height of the European debt crisis.
Michael Caronna/Reuters
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Coal
An Indian laborer rests inside the wagon of a coal train. India is the world's third-largest producer of coal, mining nearly 588 million tons in 2011. The country gets more than half its power from burning coal.
Mukesh Gupta/Reuters
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Corn
A farmer works in a corn field in El Salvador. Corn is the most widely grown grain crop in the Americas, with more than 330 million metric tons grown every year in the United States alone.
Luis Galdamez/Reuters
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Tin
A worker counts ingots of tin at a smelter in Indonesia. Tin is a silvery, malleable metal that is not easily oxidized in air and is often used for coating other metals to prevent corrosion. About half of the world's tin is used for solder.
Beawiharta/Reuters
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Steel
A worker controls the cast at a blast furnace operated by German steel manufacturer Salzgitter AG. Economic growth in China and India has caused a large increase in the demand for steel in recent years.
Christian Charisius/Reuters
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Wheat
Workers pack wheat at a food storage site in central China. Wheat is the leading source of vegetable protein in human food, having a higher protein content than either corn or rice. It is second to rice as the main human food crop.
Stringer/Reuters
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Coal
A laborer works at a wholesale coal shop in northern India. The world's coal consumption is expected to increase almost 50% to 9.98 billion tons by 2030.
Parivartan Sharma/Reuters
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Oil
A meter measuring barrels of oil sold is seen aboard a Chevron oil platform off the coast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. There are an estimated 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the gulf.
Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters
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Nickel
A truck dumps nickel waste at a disposal area in Indonesia. Nickel, which has a slow rate of oxidation, was once a common component of coins but has largely been replaced by cheaper iron.
Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters
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Wheat
A worker fills a sack of wheat at a wholesale grain market in northern India. The global trade in wheat is greater than for all other crops combined.
Ajay Verma/Reuters
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Steel
Steel pipes are displayed at a shop Seoul, South Korea. Steel, which is an alloy made by combining iron and other elements such as carbon, is one of the most common materials in the world, with more than 1.3 billion tons produced every year.
Jo Yong-Hak/Reuters
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Steel
A laborer works at a steel factory in China. The world's largest manufacturer of steel, China produced more than 715 million tons last year, according to the World Steel Association.
Stringer/Reuters
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Steel
Workers separate metal sheets at an industrial area in Mumbai, India. India has experienced a 33% growth in steel production in the last five years. The United States produced less last year than it did five years ago.
Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
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Coffee
A Costa Rican coffee worker checks the quality of sun-dried gourmet coffee beans packed for export. Coffee from different regions can often be distinguished by differences in flavor, aroma and acidity.
Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters
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Salt
A villager works in a salt field in Tibet. Salt has been the most common food preservative, especially for meat, for thousands of years.
Rex Features
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Chicken
Chickens move along a conveyor in a processing plant in Thailand. An estimated 74 percent of the world's poultry meat, and 68 percent of its eggs, are produced using factory-like practices, according to the Worldwatch Institute. More than 50 billion chickens are raised every year for food.
Dario Pignatelli/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Coffee
A worker selects coffee beans at a plantation in the Dominican Republic. Coffee is bought and sold by roasters, investors and price speculators as a tradable commodity, which makes it susceptible to significant price variations.
Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
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Coffee
A sampling tube from a coffee roaster is shown at F. Gavina & Sons., a custom coffee roaster in Vernon, Calif. The company supplies about 2,700 McDonald's fast food restaurants with coffee.
Fred Prouser/Reuters
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Steel
A man works in front of piles of steel bars at a factory in China. In 1900, the United States produced 37% of the world's steel. By 2011, the percentage had dropped to 13%. China is now the world's top exporter, producing almost 48% of the supply.
Patty Chen/Reuters
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Copper
A shipment of copper is seen in Valparaiso, Chile. The South American country is the world's leading copper producer, mining around a third of global supply.
Eliseo Fernandez/Reuters
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Gold
Gold bars are displayed in Tokyo. If you had bought gold in March 2009, when the stock market bottomed after the housing crunch, the value of your investment would have risen 80 percent through Jan. 31, 2012.
Toru Hanai/Reuters
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Sugar
A worker carries a bundle of sugarcane stalks at a fruit market in eastern India. The country is the world's second-largest producer of sugarcane.
Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters
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Propane
A worker carts propane canisters used for cooking in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Propane use is expanding quickly in non-industrialized areas of the world, replacing wood and other traditional fuel sources for heating and cooking.
Caetano Barreira/Reuters
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Gold
A small-scale miner holds gold that was melted together at a processing plant in Mongolia. In the last five years, dwindling legal gold supplies and a spike in black market demand from China have made work much more lucrative for Mongolia's "ninja miners," so named because of the large green pans carried on their backs that look like turtle shells. For thousands of dirt-poor herders, the soaring prices alone are enough to justify years of harassment, abuse and hard labor.
David Gray/Reuters
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Gold
A miner breaks stones at a primitive Thai gold mine. The miners use primitive tools and methods to extract gold from self-run mines near the country's Chatree gold mine, the country's largest and most modern. A family working at the mine can extract 1 gram of gold per day, which they sell at the site for about 1,000 Thai bahts (roughly $33).
Damir Sagolj/Reuters
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Wheat
The sun peeks through wheat that is ready for harvest in a village northeast of Berlin. Germany is the world's sixth-largest producer of wheat, growing nearly 24 million metric tons in 2010, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
Fabrizio Bensch/Files/Reuters
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Milk
An identification tag is attached to the ear of a dairy cow in the United Kingdom. The world produces more than 720 million tons of milk every year for human consumption, according to the International Dairy Federation.
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Steel
A workers attaches rebar to a column at the construction site in Lahore, Pakistan. Reinforcing bars are commonly used to add support to concrete, which has a relatively weak ability to carry tensile loads.
Mohsin Raza/Reuters
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Aluminium
The hands of a worker are seen at an aluminum factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. About 45 workers are employed at the factory, and most of them work for 12 hours a day. The daily wage is roughly $1.70 for men and $1.40 for women.
Andrew Biraj/Reuters
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Tin
Tin is displayed at a plant in Vinton, Bolivia. The smelter was originally owned by Swiss-based commodities trader Glencore but was nationalized by Bolivia's leftist government in 2007.
David Mercado/Reuters
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Potash
A manager examines a pile of processed potash at a storage facility in Colonsay, Saskatchewan. The global commodity boom and bust has lifted a little-known crop nutrient called potash out of obscurity, turning the global potash industry into an investor darling and highlighting the power of a handful of producers to control prices.
David Stobbe/Reuters
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Gasoline
A worker wipes the price display board at a gasoline station in Manila, Philippines. The United States account for about 44 percent of the world's gasoline consumption.
Romeo Ranoco/Reuters
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Chicken
Employees arrange crumbed chicken pieces before frying at a CP Foods processing plant in Thailand. CP Foods, controlled by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, is the nation's biggest meat and animal-feed producer.
Dario Pignatelli/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Oil
An employee walks on top of an oil tank at a refinery in China. The country is the world's second-biggest consumer of petroleum, after the United States.
Stringer China/Reuters
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Palm oil
An oil palm fruit is seen at a state-owned palm oil factory in Indonesia. Environmentalists have for years expressed concerns over Indonesia's palm oil producers and whether they have cleared forests to expand their plantations.
Beawiharta/Reuters
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Copper
Copper bars await shipment at a port in Chile, the world's leading copper producer. More than 95 percent of all copper ever mined and smelted by mankind has been extracted since 1900.
Eliseo Fernandez/Reuters
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Cottton
A worker stacks cotton at a factory in northwest China. China is the world's largest producer of cotton, but most of it is used domestically. The United States is the largest exporter.
China Daily/Reuters
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Coal
A worker carries a sack of coal to be loaded onto a truck at a coal dump site outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Each laborer earns $10 on an average working day. Most of them come from the northern provinces, leaving their families behind in search of fortune in the capital.
Ahmad Masood/Reuters
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Corn
A woman walks past corn as she arrives at a holy shrine to attend a mass prayer before breaking her fast during Ramadan in Tehran, Iran. A greater weight of corn is produced every year than any other grain.
Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters
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Gold
An Indonesia miner breaks stones containing gold. About 1.1 million people are employed in Indonesia's mining industry.
Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters
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Gasoline
A gauge shows the gas pressure in pipelines at a border delivery station in eastern Slovakia. The price of gasoline in Europe is usually more than twice that in the United States.
Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
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Wheat
An airplane treats winter wheat crops with chemicals to kill destructive insects in North Ossetia, Russia. The country is the world's third-largest producer of wheat.
Kazbek Basayev/Reuters
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Copper
The open pits of the Mutanda copper mine are shown in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mine produces an estimated 20,000 tons of copper annually.
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Diamonds
A pair of diamonds on display at the Hatton Garden Jewellery Emporium in London. Diamonds that have been prepared as gemstones are sold at diamond exchanges called bourses. There are 28 registered diamond bourses in the world.
Luke MacGregor/Reuters
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Gold
Gold biscuits are given finishing touches at a refinery in Mumbai, India. All the gold that's ever been mined, roughly 175,000 metric tons, could fit into four Olympic-sized swimming pool.. About 80 percent of the world's supply has been produced since 1910.
Arko Datta/Reuters
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Cocoa
Cocoa beans are seen at theBarry Callebaut chocolate factory in Belgium. The sugary treat was first sold to the public in mid-1800s in Britain by John Cadbury, who developed an emulsification process to make solid chocolate.
Yves Herman/Reuters
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Steel
Burning coke, which will be combined with iron ore, is transported to a heat recovering system at a Nippon Steel mill in Japan. The company is the world's second-biggest steelmaker, producing 32 million tons a year, a large proportion of which is used by Japanese automakers.
Michael Caronna/Reuters
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Rice
An Indonesian farm worker carries a bundle of rice stalks. Rice provides more than one fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans.
Yusuf Ahmad/Files/Reuters
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Maize
A farmer checks on his crop of corn in Northern Ireland. Corn, known globally as maize, was brought to Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries by explorers and traders returning from the Americas.
Cathal McNaughton/Reuters
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Palm oil
An aerial view shows a palm oil plantation in Indonesia's southern Sumatra province. Indonesia, the world's top palm oil producer, has moved in recent years to slow deforestation and the aggressive expansion of plantations. This has led to higher costs as companies rely on acquisitions and improved yields to boost growth.
Beawiharta/Reuters
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Coal
A coal merchant holds up a lump of coal in his yard in Melmerby, England. Coal is mined in more than 100 countries and on all continents except Antarctica.
Nigel Roddis/Reuters
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Tuna
Tuna fish are collected by a Croatian diver near Jabuka Island in the Adriatic Sea. Tuna can be a good source of omega-3 fatty acids, containing as much as 300 milligrams per serving.
Copyright Rex Features Ltd, 2012
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Cocoa
An Ivory Coast worker gathers cocoa bags in the factory yard of SAF Cacao. Ivory Coast is on track to become the world's top cocoa grinder in the next few years as the west African country seeks more value from its raw materials exports.
Luc Gnago/Reuters
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Aluminum
A worker walks between stacks of high-purity aluminum ingots at the Khakas aluminum smelter in the Siberian city of Sayanogorsk. The smelter, with an annual capacity of 300,000 tons, is the first aluminum production facility built in Russia in the last 20 years
Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
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Rice
A technician checks rice samples at inspection facility in China. Rice farming is well-suited to countries such as China, which have low labor costs and high rainfall levels.
Stringer/Reuters
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Oil
A worker climbs on a gauge at a crude oil well in Indonesia. The country's oil output, ranked No. 21 globally, has been declining over the years due to aging infrastructure.
Beawiharta/Reuters
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Rice
A worker carries a sack of rice at a farm in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Two-thirds of the impoverished country's population works in the agricultural sector.
Andrew Biraj/Reuters
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Wheat
Freshly cut wheat stands under approaching storm clouds west of Brisbane, Australia. Wheat is Australia's No. 1 crop in terms of acreage and value.
Tim Wimborne/Reuters
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Oil
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez examines a sample of crude at a nationalized oil field. The country is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and has the second-largest reserves of crude, after Canada.
Miraflores Palace/Reuters
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Oil
An illegal oil refinery is seen along the in Nigeria's delta region. The country is Africa's largest crude oil exporter, but its production capacity has been slashed in recent years by thieves drilling into pipelines passing through the delta's winding waterways. The underground industry is thought to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
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Wheat
Combines harvest wheat at a farm near Fort MacLeod, Alberta. Wheat is the most important cereal in the world and along with rice and maize accounts for about 73 percent of global grain production. Canada is the world's third-largest exporter, producing an average of more than 24 million tons a year.
Todd Korol/Reuters
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Cotton
A farmer picks cotton on a farm on the outskirts of Hami, China. The country is the world's largest cotton grower, producing 33 million bales in 2011.
Stringer/Reuters
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Corn
A farmer prepares to sun ears of corn in a Chinese village. While more people are living longer and healthier lives, the United Nations says widening gaps between rich and poor mean more people than ever are vulnerable to food and water shortages.
Stringer/Reuters
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Water
Water is released for flood prevention at China's Three Gorges Dam after relentless torrential rains hit Yangtze River region. The massive dam is the largest power plant in the world and has a capacity of 22,500 megawatts.
AFP/AFP/GettyImages
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Water
A church reader board in Atkins, Ark., pleads for rain last summer. America's farmers experienced one of the worst droughts in U.S. history last year.
Les Stone/Corbis
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Corn
Corn is harvested in Arkansas last summer. The 2012 drought rivaled the Dust Bowl, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
Les Stone/Corbis
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Gold
Miners drill underground in South Africa's Great Noligwa gold mine. Working conditions can be extremely cramped and physically grueling.