How a fertilizer shortage is spreading desperate hunger

Suleiman Chubado is not entirely clear what caused the price of fertilizer to more than double over the past year, but he is bitterly aware of the consequences. At his farm in northeastern Nigeria, he can no longer afford enough fertilizer, so his corn is stunted and pale, the scraggly plants bending toward the powdery earth.

Inside his mud house, he has grown accustomed to explaining to his two young children and pregnant wife why they must make do with two meals a day — and sometimes only one — even as hunger gnaws.

As he and his neighbors commiserate over the calamity unfolding across much of Africa, they exchange theories on one source of trouble: Russia’s war on Ukraine, which disrupted shipments of key ingredients for fertilizer.

“We are in two different worlds, separated by airplanes and oceans,” Mr. Chubado said. “How can it be affecting us here?”

That question is reverberating in many lower-income countries. Farmers are grappling with shocks that made fertilizer scarce and unaffordable, diminishing harvests, raising food prices and spreading hunger.

The war in Ukraine reduced the region’s grain exports and sent the price of staples like wheat soaring from Egypt to Indonesia. The world’s food supply is also menaced by the ravages of climate change — heat waves, drought, floods.

Now, scarce and expensive fertilizer is combining with these other forces to threaten livelihoods.

The breakdown in fertilizer production challenges the orthodoxy that has dominated international trade for decades. Prominent economists have promoted globalization as insurance against upheaval. When factories in one place cannot produce goods, they can be summoned from somewhere else. Yet as farmers across Africa and parts of Asia contend with fertilizer shortages, their anguish attests to a less celebrated aspect of the interlinked economy: Shared dependence on vital products from dominant suppliers yields widespread danger when shocks emerge.

The crisis started with the Covid-19 pandemic, which increased the cost of transporting fertilizer ingredients. Then came the war. Finally, over the last 18 months, the U.S. Federal Reserve aggressively lifted interest rates to choke off domestic inflation. That has lifted the value of the American dollar against many currencies. Because fertilizer components are priced in dollars, they have become vastly more expensive in countries like Nigeria.

Since February 2022, the price of fertilizer has more than doubled in Nigeria and 13 other countries, according to a survey by ActionAid, an international relief group. Concern about food insecurity has been “alarmingly high” in much of West and Central Africa, according to a World Bank bulletin.

In Nigeria alone, Africa’s most populous country, nearly 90 million people — roughly two-fifths of the nation — suffer from “insufficient food consumption,” according to data from the World Food Program.

In conversations with three dozen people engaged in growing crops, trading food and distributing fertilizer in northeastern Nigeria, a sense of bewilderment is palpable alongside desperation.

Farmers are shifting from growing staples like rice and corn to less valuable crops like soybeans and peanuts, which require less fertilizer. Thieves are stealing harvests. Wives are leaving husbands and returning to families with greater access to food. Parents are pulling children out of school for a lack of tuition money. Upward mobility has yielded to the imperative to hang on.

Mr. Chubado, 27, is eager to send his children to university. He typically uses some of his crop to feed his family while selling the rest to raise cash. Yet with no extra crop to sell this year, he recently moved his 10-year-old son, Abubakar, from a private school where classes are no larger than 20 to a government school where 70 children crowd into classrooms.

He cannot afford to buy the usual three school uniforms, so Abubakar must make do with one. Some days, his son complains that his uniform is too dirty and refuses to go to school.

The Pandemic Shock

Faced with extraordinary prices for inorganic or commercial fertilizers, some farmers are shifting to organic varieties, including animal manure. Longer term, that is better for soil, food quality and public health, experts say.

But it can take years for crops grown with organic fertilizers to approach the yields achieved through the use of commercial varieties. In Nigeria, home to more than 220 million people, the highest priority is the immediate pursuit of additional food. At least for now, inorganic fertilizers remain a crucial means of adding vital nutrients like nitrogen and potassium to soils.

Inorganic fertilizer is a global enterprise, one dominated by producers in the United States, China, India, Russia, Canada and Morocco. Nigeria has several fertilizer factories that produce varieties of nitrogen fertilizer, but they export nearly everything to South America. As a result, the country is vulnerable to any break in the global supply chain.

The pandemic delivered a colossal blow.

When making and blending fertilizer, Nigeria imports phosphates mined in Morocco, shipping them to the port of Lagos. Over the first two months of the pandemic, as commercial activity froze, shipping companies reduced their ports of call in sub-Saharan Africa by roughly one-fifth, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Then, as regular shipping schedules resumed, Lagos was overwhelmed by a cargo backlog. Seeking easier passage, fertilizer manufacturers diverted shipments to Port Harcourt, about 370 miles down the coast. But rampant piracy in the area entailed higher costs for insurance and freight.

In March 2021, a massive container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal, closing that artery of trade and sending global shipping prices skyward. The cost of phosphates from Morocco delivered to Nigeria grew to more than $1,000 per ton, from $300 to $400.

“You had all those problems compounding supply,” said Gideon Negedu, executive secretary of the Fertilizer Producers and Suppliers Association of Nigeria.

Then, just as supply was recovering, Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Consequences of Conflict

For fertilizer producers, the most immediate effect of the war was its impact on energy prices.

Nitrogen fertilizers are made through a chemical process that consumes energy, typically natural gas. As the United States, Europe and other governments enforced sanctions against Russia — a major gas producer — the price rose.

The war also limited access to potash, an important source of potassium. Mining potash is a major industry in Belarus, a Russian ally. Even before the war in Ukraine, Belarus confronted international restrictions on its sales. Russia is another major supplier.

American and European sanctions on Russia and Belarus include exemptions intended to allow trade in agricultural commodities. But much of the potash coming out of Belarus — a landlocked country — has traditionally been shipped from Lithuania, which has barred rail access since last year.

Fertilizer manufacturers could not simply forgo phosphates and make products with the other key nutrients, nitrogen and potassium. Many crops require all three.