When shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz slowed earlier this year, fertilizer prices moved with it. The corridor carries roughly a third of the world’s urea and nitrogen-based fertilizer. Within a week of the disruption, urea prices in the Middle East climbed 19 per cent. In Africa, urea prices doubled, from around $400 to $850 a tonne, according to Professor Tilahun Amede, director of climate, sustainable productivity and resilience at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Food already absorbs roughly half of household spending in many African countries, so the price move reached households quickly. Amede has described it as the third major fertilizer shock in five years, after the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. “Relief is not resilience,” he wrote of the eventual easing in prices.

Burkina Faso’s response, unveiled this year, is a 56,700-tonne emergency fertilizer reserve, built under a joint programme with the African Development Bank. It is one of several national responses now underway across the continent. The wider question this raises – whether African production, reserves and regional trade can meaningfully reduce dependence on imported fertilizer, or whether the continent will keep absorbing each new global shock as it comes – is what the evidence below sets out to answer.

How exposed is Africa to imported fertilizer?

The scale of the exposure is documented. About 80 per cent of the fertilizer used in sub-Saharan Africa is imported, according to a joint analysis by Chakib Jenane, the World Bank’s regional practice director for its Planet team in Western and Central Africa, and Martin Fregene, director of agriculture and agro-industry at the African Development Bank. That figure applies specifically to sub-Saharan Africa; North African producers, particularly Morocco and Egypt, alter the picture for the continent as a whole. Some industry estimates put sub-Saharan Africa’s mineral fertilizer import share closer to 90 per cent.

The World Bank’s April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook projected global fertilizer prices could rise more than 30 per cent this year because of the Hormuz disruption, with urea potentially averaging $675 a tonne- nearly 60 per cent above 2025 levels.

Smallholder farmers carry most of that exposure. They produce nearly 70 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s food, according to Jenane and Fregene, and they typically cannot lock in fertilizer supply ahead of a price spike the way larger commercial operations can. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that a 10 per cent reduction in fertilizer availability could cut maize, rice and wheat output across sub-Saharan Africa by up to 25 per cent, and could push food inflation as high as 8 per cent across the region.

Why the raw materials haven’t translated into supply

Phosphate is the input most associated with Africa’s fertilizer potential, and the continent’s position is genuinely dominant: North Africa holds an estimated 70 to 78 per cent of the world’s known phosphate reserves, concentrated mainly in Morocco. Amede argues that phosphate is not, in fact, the binding constraint. “Africa’s binding constraint is often nitrogen rather than phosphate,” he has written.

Nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas, and several African states – Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Mozambique, Tunisia and Senegal, among them – hold gas feedstock sufficient to manufacture nitrogen at scale. Amede’s assessment is that these gas-producing states largely pursue fertilizer manufacturing on their own terms, often prioritising export markets, rather than through a shared continental strategy for nitrogen supply.

Reserves have not automatically converted into processing capacity in phosphate or nitrogen. Fertilizer manufacturing requires large upfront capital, reliable energy and years of construction before a plant produces its first tonne – a constraint that applies globally, not only in Africa. African fertilizer production has grown 146 per cent since 2002, an indication that the gap between reserves and output, while still wide, is narrowing.

What Africa’s largest producers are building

Morocco’s state-owned OCP Group holds roughly 70 per cent of the world’s known phosphate reserves and produced around 12 million tonnes of fertilizer in 2024. It has committed to a $13 billion investment programme through 2027 aimed at raising output to 20 million tonnes. OCP directs 54 per cent of its exports to African markets; the remainder goes to buyers including the United States, India and Brazil, which is relevant to the question of how much of Morocco’s expanded capacity is actually earmarked for African farmers rather than global buyers.

Its largest single African project is a joint venture with the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority in Akwa Ibom State, built to produce ammonia and fertilizer for both export back to Morocco and domestic Nigerian use – a structure in which raw materials move in both directions rather than Nigeria simply receiving finished product.

Nigeria’s own nitrogen producers have expanded separately. Dangote Fertiliser’s urea plant produces around 3 million tonnes a year, a volume that industry analysts say puts Nigeria in a position to export urea rather than import it. The Africa Finance Corporation is backing a $7 billion expansion intended to triple that capacity and add a further plant in Ethiopia. Indorama Eleme has completed a third urea production line in Nigeria, backed by a $75 million African Development Bank loan. Both projects draw on Nigeria’s domestic gas supply, the kind of feedstock advantage Amede’s nitrogen argument points to directly.

Producing more fertilizer in Africa is not the same as producing more fertilizer for African farmers. Nigeria’s expansions are broadly described as aimed at regional West African supply, but whether that supply reaches farmers in neighbouring countries depends on transport and trade conditions that are separate from production capacity itself – the subject of the next section.

Why fertilizer doesn’t always reach the farmers who need it

Production capacity answers only part of the brief’s core question. Getting fertilizer from a plant or a port to a farmer’s field is its own separate obstacle, and it is often the more expensive one. Transport and distribution bottlenecks add an estimated 30 to 60 per cent to farm-gate fertilizer prices in landlocked countries such as Chad and Mali, according to industry market analysis.

In Zambia, transport costs from coastal ports can run as high as $253 a tonne, more than 30 per cent of the delivered price of fertilizer, according to research on regional fertilizer logistics. A comparison of fertilizer-to-maize price ratios found that landlocked countries such as Malawi and Zambia carry substantially higher ratios than coastal countries including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, a gap researchers attribute directly to transport costs rather than production costs.

Coastal countries with large ports -Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya- among them function as import and consumption hubs that also re-export fertilizer onward to landlocked neighbours, adding further steps, and further cost, to the supply chain before fertilizer reaches an inland farmer.

A July 2026 industry bulletin from the International Fertilizer Development Centre’s regional association describes the underlying pattern: even once fertilizer clears an African port, inefficient port operations, inadequate transport infrastructure, weak rural distribution networks and last-mile delivery gaps continue to delay access and raise costs, with landlocked countries affected most severely.

Some producers are responding directly to that gap rather than waiting for infrastructure to catch up. OCP has begun rolling out smaller-scale “blending units” in a number of African countries, intended to let fertilizer be mixed and packaged closer to farmers rather than shipped fully finished from Morocco.

How governments are responding

National governments have taken varied approaches since the Hormuz disruption, and Burkina Faso’s is among the most developed. Its Emergency Operation for Strengthening Agricultural Production, known by its French acronym OURPA-BF and jointly financed with the African Development Bank at a combined cost of 60.04 billion CFA francs, or $107.4 million, includes the 56,700-tonne emergency reserve alongside the purchase of 68,700 tonnes of fertilizer and more than 10,000 tonnes of improved seed.

Fertilizer consumption in Burkina Faso nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, from roughly 164,000 to 327,000 tonnes, according to the International Fertilizer Development Centre, which is part of why the government describes the reserve as necessary rather than precautionary.

Other countries illustrate different approaches to the same problem. Niger has run a subsidy programme covering roughly 38,500 tonnes, combining donor financing, a bilateral donation and direct government procurement, sold to farmers at a subsidised price per bag. Zambia has invested in a domestic urea plant intended to reduce its reliance on imports, though analysts at the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute note that rising import and logistics costs still threaten affordability for the coming season.

These examples point to two broad strategies running in parallel across the continent: building reserves and subsidy systems to manage price shocks after they happen, and building domestic production to reduce exposure to those shocks in the first place.

The regional backstop

The African Development Bank’s $1.5 billion African Emergency Food Production Facility, launched in 2022, has supported nearly 16 million smallholder farmers across 35 countries with seeds and fertilizer, and has delivered 3.5 million tonnes of fertilizer to date. It is now entering a second phase that the Bank describes as shifting focus from emergency relief toward longer-term national food production capacity. The facility functions as a continental response to a problem that, on the evidence above, individual countries have so far addressed mainly through their own separate national programmes.

A different view on what the goal should be

Not every analysis of Africa’s fertilizer dependence accepts that expanding synthetic fertilizer production is the right target. Writing for Africa Is a Country, commentator Ocean Postman argues that fertilizer dependence reflects agricultural systems still structured around export-oriented commercial farming, and that the goal should be agroecological practices – locally sourced seed, intercropping, natural soil amendments that reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizer altogether, rather than building African versions of the same input-intensive model.

This view sits outside the mainstream of the government and development-finance strategies described above, which treat expanded production and better-targeted subsidies as central to the response. It raises a distinct question worth stating plainly: whether the aim is self-sufficiency within the current fertilizer-dependent model of farming, or a shift toward a model that requires less fertilizer in the first place.

What would need to change

Amede has set out his own recommendations for what a more resilient system would require: better real-time tracking of trade flows and shipping routes; pooled regional procurement and shared buffer stocks, so countries negotiate collectively rather than compete for scarce cargo; expansion of domestic and regional production alongside upgraded blending plants, ports and railways; a shift from blanket subsidies toward targeted, digitally delivered support for smallholders; and continued backing for the African Union’s ten-year Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan, adopted in 2024, which aims to triple fertilizer use, restore degraded soil and double cereal yields over the coming decade.

These are his proposals, not a settled consensus, though several of them overlap with points made separately by the World Bank and AfDB.

Evidence shows a continent with substantial phosphate and gas reserves, a production base that has grown significantly since 2002 but remains concentrated in a small number of countries, and a distribution system in which transport and border costs frequently add as much to the price of fertilizer as production costs do. Burkina Faso’s reserve, Niger’s subsidy programme, Nigeria’s expanding urea capacity and Morocco’s investment programme each address one part of that chain.

Whether they add up to reduced import dependence at a continental scale depends on how much of that new production reaches farmers through supply chains that, on the evidence available, remain the weaker link.