19 October 2026, Beijing: China’s exports of phosphate fertilizers have fallen from roughly 5.3 million tonnes in 2025 to almost nothing so far in 2026, according to data from price-reporting agency Argus Media, cited by trade outlets Western Producer and UkrAgroConsult. The near-total halt is tightening an already stretched global phosphate market and has pushed affordability for farmers in import-dependent countries to its worst level in years.
Phosphate fertilizers, including diammonium phosphate (DAP), monoammonium phosphate (MAP) and single superphosphate (SSP), are essential for root development and are typically blended into the NPK compounds used across cereals, oilseeds and horticulture. According to Argus analyst Lynn Wang, Chinese producers have become “focused solely on meeting domestic demand” because of tight sulfur supplies, a critical raw material in phosphoric acid manufacturing. Beijing has for several years used export policy to steady its domestic fertilizer market, and the latest curb extends that approach to both phosphate fertilizer and sulfuric acid shipments.
Argus expects only a partial recovery, forecasting Chinese phosphate exports of around 2 million tonnes in 2027, still well below the 5.3 million tonnes shipped in 2025. A fuller rebound, the agency says, depends on China’s sulfur supply stabilising, something that has no clear timeline yet.
Brazil’s plants idled, affordability at a multi-year low
The squeeze is not confined to China. Sulfur shortages have already forced production cuts at Brazilian plants manufacturing MAP, SSP and TSP (triple superphosphate), per Argus reporting. With two major producing regions constrained at the same time, Argus’s affordability index now ranks phosphate as the least affordable of the major fertilizer nutrients for farmers at current prices, worse than nitrogen or potash.
The picture elsewhere is markedly different. China’s urea exports have stayed comparatively strong, forecast at 6 to 7 million tonnes for 2026, which traders say has helped keep global urea prices contained even as phosphate prices climb. That divergence, ample nitrogen but scarce phosphate, is unusual and complicates procurement planning for national fertilizer buyers and large cooperatives as they head into the next planting windows in both hemispheres.
A sourcing headache for importers
For countries that depend on imported phosphate rather than domestic rock and acid production, the timing is awkward. Global DAP and MAP prices had already risen through much of 2026 on tight supply, and the near-total absence of Chinese cargoes removes a swing supplier that, in a normal year, ships several million tonnes into South Asian, African and Latin American markets. Buyers are likely to lean more heavily on Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United States to fill the gap, competing for the same tonnes at a time when freight and input costs remain elevated.
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