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livemint.com / 1 month ago
livemint.com / 1 month ago
livemint.com / 1 month ago
livemint.com / 1 month ago
Gulf war fertilizer crunch: Why it’s good news for China and bad news for India
You might have heard that the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz is going to leave poor countries starving. That’s not quite right. The reality may be almost as serious, though—and China will be the victor.The theory stems from the importance of the Persian Gulf in the world’s fertilizer trade.
Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC—particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman—are key to supplies of two of the three most important crop nutrients.They account for about a quarter of the world’s exports of urea, which provides nitrogen to plants and encourages lush, leafy growth. They’re arguably even more important for phosphorus, which stimulates healthy fruit and seeds. Making phosphorus fertilizers involves stripping sulphur out of petroleum, turning it into sulphuric acid, and then using it to dissolve hard phosphate rock.
Roughly a third of this sulphuric ultimately derives from Middle Eastern oil and gas. That suggests the current disruption is an emergency, but the global trade in crop nutrients is far more diversified than the petroleum business. The European Union exports more fertilizers than the GCC.
Canada and Morocco are the dominant players in, respectively, potash and phosphate. The Ukraine war barely upset Russia’s position as the world’s biggest fertilizer exporter. Fears of starvation in the wake of that invasion turned out to be overblown.
Global hunger has actually declined slightly instead of increasing since 2022. China’s position is worth watching, though. The immense scale of its domestic fertilizer industry makes it a sort of OPEC of fertilizers, producing about 44% of the world’s phosphate, 30% of nitrogen, 23% of sulphur, and 13% of potash.
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