Russia Caps Fertilizer Exports, Threatening Brazil’s Harvest

Russia fertilizer exports are now capped for the fifth consecutive year, but for the first time the restrictions coincide with simultaneous disruptions from both the Persian Gulf and China — a convergence that hits Brazil harder than any other country on earth.

Russia has extended its Russia fertilizer exports quota through the end of November, capping shipments at 20 million tonnes as a global supply deficit deepens. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that Brazil stands to absorb the heaviest impact because it is the world’s largest fertilizer importer and Russia’s biggest single customer, receiving 32.2% of all its fertilizer imports from Moscow in 2025.

The Russian government announced the new quotas on April 22. The allocation includes 8.7 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizers, more than 4.2 million tonnes of ammonium nitrate, and approximately 7 million tonnes of complex fertilizers.

Why Brazil Is the Hardest Hit by Russia Fertilizer Exports Caps

The numbers expose an extraordinary dependency. Brazil imports approximately 85% of the fertilizers its agriculture consumes — more than 45.5 million tonnes in 2025, a record. Russia alone supplied 14.7 million tonnes of that volume, worth nearly four billion dollars.

Brazil’s dependence on Russian fertilizers is the single largest bilateral fertilizer trade relationship in the world.

Russia is also virtually the sole supplier of ammonium nitrate to Brazil and a dominant source of potash, a nutrient for which Brazil imports 98% of its needs. Any quota tightening in Moscow translates directly into planting-cost inflation across Mato Grosso, Parana, and Sao Paulo — the states that generate the bulk of Brazil’s soybean and corn output.

The agriculture ministry has classified the fertilizer supply outlook as an extremely high risk to the 2026/27 harvest. Fertilizer accounts for 30% to 40% of a Brazilian farmer’s operating costs, and any sustained price increase eats directly into the margins that delivered a record 38.1 billion dollars in first-quarter agribusiness exports.

Three Supply Shocks Hitting at Once

The Russian caps do not arrive in isolation. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut roughly one-third of globally traded seaborne fertilizer volumes. Persian Gulf nations supplied approximately 36% of Brazil’s urea imports in 2025, and those routes are now disrupted.

China, which doubled phosphate exports to Brazil during the Ukraine-era crisis in 2022, has reversed course. Chinese producers secured export restrictions on MAP — the primary phosphate product for soybean planting — through at least August 2026. MAP prices at Brazilian ports surged to approximately 720 dollars per tonne, up 13% since January.

Now Russia, the only remaining large-scale alternative, is constraining supply to protect its own spring planting. In March, Moscow went further by temporarily suspending all ammonium nitrate export licenses for one month. A Ukrainian drone strike also damaged a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Smolensk, with production expected to remain halted until May.

What Brazil Is Doing About It

Petrobras approved the one-billion-dollar revival of the UFN-III fertilizer plant in Tres Lagoas in April, alongside reactivated plants in Bahia, Sergipe, and Parana. Together, these could reduce nitrogen import dependency from 88% to approximately 65% by 2029, according to the FUP petroleum workers’ federation. But the plants will not produce a single tonne before 2028 at the earliest.

In the meantime, Brazil has scrambled to diversify. Morocco’s fertilizer exports to Brazil rose 30% in 2025 as the country races to rebuild its fertilizer industry. EuroChem inaugurated a one-billion-dollar phosphate complex in Minas Gerais, and Israel’s Haifa Group began construction of a controlled-release fertilizer plant in Uberlandia.

But diversification takes years. For the 2026/27 planting season, which begins in September, Brazilian farmers will still depend on Russian, Moroccan, and Canadian imports at prices that have nearly doubled since the Iran war started in February.

What This Means for Global Food Prices

Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, sugar, coffee, orange juice, chicken, and beef. When fertilizer costs rise in Brazil, they ripple through global commodity prices within months. Norway’s Yara reported first-quarter EBITDA of 896 million dollars, 40% above estimates, driven directly by the price surge — illustrating how the crisis enriches producers while squeezing the farmers who feed the planet.

The Brazil agribusiness sector now faces a structural question: whether the triple supply shock forces a reduction in planted acreage for the 2026/27 cycle, or whether farmers absorb the cost and pass it forward into higher commodity prices. Either outcome means more expensive food for the one billion people that Brazilian agriculture helps feed.