When cargo traffic slowed through the Strait of Hormuz this year, the price of feeding a continent moved with it. That single corridor carries roughly a third of the world’s urea and other nitrogen-based fertilisers. Within a week of the disruption, urea prices in the Middle East climbed 19 per cent. Thousands of kilometres away, in markets across Africa where food already absorbs about half of a household’s daily spending, the arithmetic was brutal, with Urea price doubling from $400 to $850 per tonne: when fertiliser costs rise, food prices follow, and the distance between a difficult season and a hungry one narrows to nothing.
Like many other voices, we continue to advocate for a durable peace among the parties to the Third Gulf War. The restoration of normal traffic through Hormuz would ease the flow of fertiliser and fuel and bring genuine relief to strained global markets. However, relief is not resilience, and I want to be blunt about the difference.
Relief is not resilience
This was the third major fertiliser shock in five years, after the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and now the Gulf and Africa have to absorb the cost of these events. Rather than a single-crisis event, this is the structural dependence that turns every distant quarrel into a domestic emergency.
Here is what should trouble every African the most: we do not need to invent our way out of this. The technologies, entrepreneurs, and institutional platforms already exist on the continent. Nutrient-enriched, locally produced organic fertilisers, biostimulants and emerging green-ammonia pathways are present realities that need scale rather than a fresh discovery. Our core problem has been the failure to align financing, policy design, and market structure with what we already have and, above all, the failure to make farming profitable enough so that supply reliably follows demand. By improving nutrient use efficiency and embracing nature-based nutrient sourcing, smallholder farmers could improve their productivity while reducing costs. Profitability is among the most powerful levers in the entire food system, and one of the most systematically underused.
The assets are already in our hands. North Africa holds roughly 78 per cent of the world’s phosphate reserves. African fertiliser production has grown 146 per cent since 2002. We have built the machinery for pooled procurement, regional trade and local manufacturing — the African Continental Free Trade Area, the Africa Trade Exchange, and the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan. What is missing is not potential. It is the sustained investment that turns potential into appropriate fertiliser, reaching a smallholder farmer affordably and on time.
Nitrogen, the constraint we don’t talk about
We talk a great deal about Africa’s phosphate wealth, and rightly so, but this is where the conversation needs to change. In most African soils, about 70 per cent of crop yield is dictated by the two nutrients, Nitrogen and Phosphorus. And yet, Africa’s binding constraint is nitrogen rather than phosphate. Nitrogen is the nutrient African farmers use and crops need most, and it is the one tied most directly to natural gas, the feedstock from which it is made. Africa is not short of gas. Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Mozambique, Tunisia, Senegal and a growing list of others sit on the very feedstock required to manufacture nitrogen at scale, yet they largely do so in isolation, if at all.
Africa’s gas-producing nations need to come together around a shared continental nitrogen agenda: coordinated investment in production that serves African farmers first, not only export markets. This should run alongside the green-ammonia initiatives now emerging, so that as we build synthetic nitrogen capacity today, we are also investing in the cleaner, renewable pathways of tomorrow.
Resilience is not a choice between organic and synthetic, or between old and new. It is an integrated soil-health system in farms and landscapes in which locally produced mineral and organic inputs each play their part, and each is used efficiently. That is precisely the balance the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Summit is working to strike, and it is the right one.
From emergency response to structural transformation
To achieve this, we need two commitments moving in step. Governments must channel investment into local and regional production, strategic reserves, blending facilities, soil-health and extension services, and the trade corridors that move inputs efficiently, and they must retire blanket subsidies in favour of targeted, digitally delivered support for smallholder farmers, most of whom are women. The private sector should be supported by building manufacturing and blending capacity, providing fertiliser financing and insurance, and developing distribution networks that deliver affordable supply to the last mile. Dangote’s USD 7 billion regional expansion, an ambition to become the world’s largest urea platform, is a sign of what African capital can do at scale. Development finance institutions can de-risk and catalyse the rest.
The opening created by any easing of the Gulf crisis is precisely the moment to act, not to exhale. It is the chance to move Africa’s fertiliser agenda from emergency response to structural transformation: an ecosystem that is affordable, climate-smart, regionally integrated and sovereign. It is also imperative to rehabilitate Africa’s degraded lands and ecosystems. The hardest time to build resilience is in the middle of a shock. The best time is every window, while markets are calm and the memory of the last disruption is still fresh.
Africa cannot transform its food systems while remaining hostage to every fluctuation in global fertiliser, fuel and freight. We have rebuilt our food security too many times, on someone else’s timetable. This needs to be the shock we finally respond to meaningfully, by building a fertiliser system of our own.
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Prof. Tilahun Amede is Director of Climate, Sustainable Productivity and Resilience at AGRA, an African-led institution driving inclusive agricultural transformation across the continent since 2006.
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