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When cargo traffic slowed through the Strait of Hormuz this year, the cost of feeding continents moved with it. The corridor carries roughly a third of the world’s urea and nitrogen-based fertilisers.
Within a week, urea prices in the Middle East climbed 19 percent. Across Africa, where food already absorbs about half of household spending, the arithmetic was brutal: urea prices doubled from $400 to $850 per tonne, triggering a sharp rise in food prices.
The resumption of fertiliser and fuel flows brings relief to strained global markets. However, relief is not resilience. This was the third major fertiliser shock in five years, following the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The Horn of Africa absorbed the cost.
It is structural dependence that turns distant conflicts into domestic emergencies. African states do not need to invent their way out of this challenge. The technologies and platforms already exist. Locally produced organic fertilisers, biostimulants and green-ammonia pathways already exist and need to be scaled.
The core problem is failure to align financing, policy design and market structures, so farming is profitable enough for supply to reliably follow demand. Improving nutrient-use efficiency and embracing nature-based nutrient sourcing can raise smallholder productivity and profits while reducing costs. Profitability is one of the food system’s most powerful levers and one of the most underused.
The assets are here. North Africa holds roughly 78 percent of the world’s phosphate reserves, while African fertiliser production has grown by 146 percent since 2002.
We have also built platforms for pooled procurement, regional trade and local manufacturing through AfCFTA, the Africa Trade Exchange and the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan. What is missing is sustained investment to get fertiliser to smallholder farmers affordably and on time.
But the conversation needs to change. In many African soils, nitrogen and phosphorus are among the most important nutrients determining crop yields. Africa’s binding constraint is often nitrogen rather than phosphate.