Brazil’s fertilizer gap is a global food risk

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Brazil feeds 800 million people on imported fertilizer.

Brazilian agriculture feeds roughly 800 million people, about 10% of the world’s population. In 2024, according to World Trade Organization data, Brazil exported US$144.4 billion in agricultural products while importing just US$15.4 billion — a net surplus of roughly US$129 billion, more than four times Argentina’s, the next-largest net agricultural exporter. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, beef, poultry, coffee, sugar and orange juice, and a top-three producer and exporter of corn. Brazil alone supplies more than half of global soybean trade. The world’s food supply increasingly depends on Brazil, and Brazil’s harvests depend on fertilizer it barely produces.

That is the paradox: the country that feeds so much of the world cannot feed its own fields without imports from a handful of foreign suppliers. Its farms run on three nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — and, according to the latest UN Food and Agriculture Organization data, in 2024, Brazil imports roughly 90% of the fertilizer it used.

Brazilian farms use more than a tenth of the world’s fertilizer, but the country produces barely 1% of it, despite meaningful domestic capability, and imports nearly a fifth of all fertilizer traded internationally. By nutrient, the same data puts nitrogen import dependence at about 99%; Brazil runs the largest nitrogen-fertilizer trade deficit of any country in the world, at US$4.3 billion in 2024, with most supply coming from China, Russia, Nigeria and Oman. Even phosphate, which Brazil partly mines at home, is about 70% imported, mostly from Morocco and Russia.

Since Brazil is the world’s largest net food exporter, fertilizer concentration is what turns import dependence into a food-security risk. And because nitrogen fertilizer is made mostly from natural gas, it also turns every energy crisis into a farm crisis. When global prices spike, sanctions bite or shipping lanes close, the cost lands directly on Brazilian farms.

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