A fertile storm: Wales’ fertilizer gamble in a fragmenting world

Simon Hobson

On 8 August 2025, the farming community, spearheaded by the Farmer’s Guardian, will celebrate the tenth year of the ‘24 hours in farming’ campaign.

The objective of the event is to highlight the daily activities and challenges of working in agriculture.

Of impact to those who grow our food, is the cost of nourishing crops.

The price of bread

Wales, and the other nations of the United Kingdom, are vulnerable. The global fertilizer market, once the domain of quiet supply chains and predictable cycles, is now a frontline in the battle for geopolitical influence and economic resilience.

Beneath the dry metrics of phosphates (essential for plant growth and increasing harvest yields) and tariffs, lies a far richer story: one of power, strategy, and the price nations pay to feed themselves in an increasingly unstable world.

Phosphate prices are soaring—and they show no sign of coming back to earth. A reflection not merely of supply and demand mechanics but of deeper political forces.

The hopeful speculation of merchants that China might lift its fertilizer export restrictions this summer is fading. Industry watchers had bet on Beijing easing its grip.

But, even if any such loosening occurs, it’ll be selective—most likely in favour of politically convenient markets like Kenya and Ethiopia, where strategic influence trumps free-market ideology.

Is Putin feeding your family?

Meanwhile, Europe finds itself at a critical juncture, reevaluating its dependency on Russian and Belarusian fertilizer imports.

On 1 st July 2025, the EU’s long-anticipated tariff regime comes into force—one that promises to reshape not only trade flows but the very architecture of European agriculture.

For decades, European (including that of the UK, which has no phosphate reserves and very limited nitrogen and potash production), fertilizer strategy was guided by cost-efficiency, not security.

Imported nitrogen from Russia and potash from Belarus feeds our citizens.

To understand the EU’s new stance, one must begin with the concept of ‘Most Favoured Nation’ (MFN) status under World Trade Organization rules. Despite the ongoing war in the Ukraine, neither Russia nor Belarus had their MFN status revoked in the EU — the UK revoked MFN status for Russia and Belarus in March 2022.

But despite the UK’s position, fertilisers originating from Russia and Belarus continue to enter the British Isles through resale markets. Worse still, EU imports of nitrogen fertilizer from Russia increased in the years following the invasion, highlighting the gaping chasm between rhetoric and policy.

Now, the EU is proposing a 50% ad valorem tariff on Russian and Belarusian agricultural goods. This marks a decisive, if belated, move to reduce Europe’s reliance on two authoritarian states that wield fertilizers as economic cudgels. The goal is not simply moral rectitude: it’s about controlling the levers of food security in a more hostile world.

Entangled in profits

Yet contradictions abound. The European Commission has carved out exemptions for exports to third countries. Russian and Belarusian fertilizers can still transit through the EU, be warehoused, insured, and shipped on EU vessels, provided their destination lies outside the bloc, for instance, Wales.

The message is clear: while the EU seeks to disentangle its own agricultural sector from hostile dependencies, it remains committed to maintaining economic significance in global food security, ensuring that lucrative re-export businesses aren’t disrupted.

This diplomatic threading of the needle, sanctioning the source while protecting the trade, is not just policy ambiguity. Its commercial realpolitik having won the day.

No easy substitutes

There’s a deeper irony here. While the West frames its tariff moves as a necessary rebuke to Russia’s militarism, it remains utterly dependent on the very products it seeks to penalise.

Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of both nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers. Belarus, for its part, dominates potash production.

In 2024, Russian-origin NPKs (compound fertilizers containing nitrogen, phosphate, and potash) made up 20% of EU fertilizer imports, a market share that simply cannot be replaced overnight.

The uncomfortable truth is that there are no easy substitutes.

The EU wants to extricate itself from the geopolitical risk of Russian imports, but the alternatives are either insufficient, expensive, or themselves politically fraught. There are new fertilizer manufacturing plants under construction across the globe, but their long-term viability is uncertain, and none promise to match the low-cost scale of Russia and Belarus in the near term.

Here lies the crux: fertilizer is no longer merely a commodity. It’s an instrument of national strategy, a determinant of global influence, and a mirror to the moral compromises that modern nations must navigate.

For all the EU’s and UK’s ambition, fertilizer policy reveals a continent wrestling with its past dependencies and struggling to chart a credible course toward self-sufficiency.

Food prices set to rise

The future of food security in Europe may depend less on tariffs than on hard investment in domestic production, smarter energy policy, and a long-overdue conversation about the role of agriculture in a decarbonising, de-globalising world.

Fertilizers may be basic in chemistry, but their politics are anything but. And in this increasingly multipolar landscape, where alliances shift and commodities become pawns, a nation’s fertilizer strategy may end up being less about feeding its own and more about keeping up appearances.

While the real power continues to lie in the hands of those willing to dig deep and export smart, what is certain are the ever-increasing costs to our farmers, and by implication higher food prices for all of us.