Tag: Agriculture

Simon Inglethorpe, editor of Fertilizer International, shares his thoughts on the hurdles facing the fertilizer industry and how best to vault these.

CRU recently relaunched its Fertilizer International and BCInsight Platform. This relaunch coincided with the Fertilizer Latino Americano (FLA) conference in Rio de Janeiro, where we issued our inaugural sentiment survey for delegates. This insight presents and analyses the survey results, which point towards an optimistic tone for 2025 markets in Brazil and beyond. Prices are […]

Nitrogen+Syngas went to press just a few days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in as the next president of the United States. While it is sometimes difficult to sort the truth from the hyperbole in his public pronouncements, nevertheless, if taken at face value, they would seem to indicate that we may be in for a turbulent four years in commodity markets in particular. While he is an avowed military non-interventionist, on the economic policy side he has emerged as a firm believer in the power of tariffs to alter markets in the favour of the US, and has promised 20% tariffs on all goods entering the US, potentially rising to 25% for Canada and Mexico, and 60% for his particular bugbear, China, sparking a scramble for wholesalers to stock up in the last few weeks of the Biden presidency. Trump previously raised tariffs on Chinese goods entering the US to 20% during his first term, and the Biden administration made no attempt to reverse this, and even added some additional ones, for example 20% on Russian and Moroccan phosphate imports.

Although China remains the world’s largest phosphate producer, it has been overtaken as the largest exporter by Morocco in recent years as domestic producers face continuing restrictions on exports.

As more focus extends to a circular economy, there are industry wide discussions on whether future global sulphur demand will be challenged by the energy transition and decarbonisation. Hannes Storch, Collin Bartlett and Marcus Runkel of Metso discuss how the recycling of pyrite tailings could address some of these issues.