Inside the global fertilizer crunch

While much of the world has been focused on the war in Iran’s impact on the energy sector, another arguably more impactful market has been largely overlooked: fertilizer.

The global fertilizer market is in a precarious spot. Roughly a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer trade goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the war in Iran began, China, the world’s top phosphate producer, halted exports of the crucial compound. As a result, the longer the strait remains closed, the more the threat to our global food supply escalates.

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Josh Linville, vice president of Fertilizer at StoneX, to make sense of the global fertilizer market and its cascading impacts.

Shayle and Josh cover topics including:

• The current state of global fertilizer markets
• The tenuous relationship between natural gas prices and the cost of producing nitrogen-based fertilizers in Europe
• How stalled shipments of fertilizer could impact supply and demand for next year’s planting season
• The impact of Chinese phosphate export restrictions on the global market
• How a prolonged closure of the Strait could impact food supplies around the world

Resources

• Josh Linville’s X account
• Open Circuit: Iran, energy shocks, and the case for distributed power
• Latitude Media: DOE’s second ‘Energy Dominance’ loan was reworked to embrace coal
• Latitude Media: This isn’t demand destruction. It’s rationing.

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

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