THE GROUND THAT FEEDS THE WORLD CANNOT FEED ITSELF
By Anthony Muchoki | March 2026
Based on the author’s analysis: Africa Fertilizer Production & Trade Dynamics Across 55 Nations
I have spent months staring at a number that should not exist. In Togo – a country that sits atop 30,000 tonnes of phosphate rock reserves, that mines and sells that rock to the world – farmers must import 65 per cent of the fertilizer they need. Where does it come from? Morocco. The very phosphate that left Togolese soil as raw rock has been processed in Casablanca, transformed into DAP and NPK compounds, loaded onto ships, and sold back to Togolese farmers at international market prices. The value addition happened elsewhere. The profit was captured elsewhere. The sovereignty was surrendered at the dockside.
This is not a Togolese anomaly. It is the African agricultural model. And it is the single most dangerous structural weakness in a continent that must feed two and a half billion people by the middle of this century.
My study of fertilizer production and trade dynamics across all 55 nations of the African continent reveals a paradox so stark that it should be front-page news in every capital from Rabat to Cape Town: Africa is the source of the world’s fertilizer raw materials, and Africa is the world’s most fertilizer-import-dependent region. These two facts coexist not because of geography or accident. They coexist because of a failure of industrial policy, a failure of regional trade architecture, and a failure of political will that has persisted across six decades of independence.
The evidence is unambiguous. The argument is clear. The solution, while expensive and politically complex, is entirely achievable. Every African nation needs its own fertilizer production capacity. Not a shared continental plant. Not a regional hub serviced by one dominant actor. Every nation. The argument for this position – which I will now make in full – rests on five pillars: resource endowment, import dependency data, geopolitical vulnerability, agronomic urgency, and the emerging policy framework that, for the first time, makes continental industrialisation a realistic ambition.
I. The Phosphate Paradox: Africa’s Resources, Africa’s Poverty
Africa holds approximately 70 per cent of the world’s phosphate rock reserves. Its natural gas deposits – the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer – are among the largest on the planet. The continent possesses potash deposits of significant scale in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression (conservatively estimated at 11 to 12 billion tonnes), in Eritrea, and in the Republic of Congo. By every measure of raw material endowment, Africa should be the world’s dominant fertilizer producer. Instead, production remains catastrophically concentrated.
My analysis of longitudinal production data confirms that Africa’s inorganic fertilizer output grew by 165 per cent between 2000 and 2023 – from 5.3 million metric nutrient tons to approximately 14.1 million metric nutrient tons. This sounds like progress. It is not the progress it appears to be.
Production is controlled by six nations: Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Algeria, Tunisia, and South Africa. These six countries account for approximately 90 per cent of the continent’s entire fertilizer manufacturing output. The remaining 49 nations — home to the vast majority of Africa’s smallholder farmers, the majority of the continent’s arable land, and the majority of its food insecurity — produce almost nothing.
Africa became a net fertilizer exporter in 2016. This headline obscures a more inconvenient truth: most African farmers have never seen a bag of African-made fertilizer.
Morocco’s OCP Group, which controls roughly 70 per cent of global phosphate rock reserves, accounts for 61 per cent of all phosphate-based fertilizer sold on the continent. One company, in one country, holds the nutritional fate of a continent’s agriculture. By 2024, Morocco was the world’s single largest fertilizer exporter by value, with exports reaching $12.63 billion. The continent exports the raw material, Morocco processes it, and the continent buys it back. This is not trade. This is the colonial commodity model operating without modification into the third decade of the 21st century.
II. The Application Catastrophe: What Dependency Actually Costs
Numbers about production and trade are abstract. The cost of this dependency is not abstract. It is written in soil depletion, in stunted crops, in hunger.
The average fertilizer application rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is between 15 and 22 kilograms per hectare. The global average is 139 kg/ha. This means African farmers are applying, at best, one-sixth of the nutrients that their land requires. The Abuja Declaration of 2006 set a target of 50 kg/ha by 2015. By 2022, the continental average had reached only 34.5 kg/ha — and had fallen from a peak of 42.5 kg/ha in 2019, following the global fertilizer price crisis. After sixteen years of continental commitment, Africa still applies less than one-quarter of the nutrients that the global average farmer applies.
This is not a function of agronomic ignorance. It is a function of price. When fertilizer must be imported — transported by ship from Russia or China or Saudi Arabia, cleared through customs, moved by road through broken infrastructure — it arrives at the farmgate at a price that the average African smallholder, earning perhaps $600 to $1,200 per year from agriculture, simply cannot afford. The farmers who most need fertilizer to escape poverty are denied access to it precisely because the cost of dependency converts a productive input into a luxury.
Ethiopia imported 1.97 million metric tonnes of fertilizer in 2024 — the largest import volume of any nation on the continent. Every kilogram was purchased at international market prices. Every kilogram was transported across oceans. Every kilogram was paid for in foreign exchange that Ethiopia’s economy can barely sustain. Kenya imported 834,331 tonnes. Tanzania imported 789,842 tonnes — an increase of 26 per cent in a single year. These are not small numbers for small economies.
The East African region, which encompasses some of the world’s most fertile soils — the volcanic highlands of Kenya, the river plains of Tanzania, the lacustrine basins of Uganda and Rwanda — applies fertilizer at rates that are a fraction of what those soils could productively absorb. The land is willing. The capital is absent. The industry does not exist.
The farmer who cannot buy fertilizer does not simply produce less. She mines her soil. She depletes the organic matter, the micronutrients, the structure that took millennia to build. Fertilizer dependency is not only an economic problem. It is an ecological catastrophe in slow motion.
III. The Geopolitical Weapon: What Happens When the Ship Doesn’t Come
In April 2022, urea prices on international markets reached their highest levels in decades. The trigger was the Russian invasion of Ukraine — a conflict 6,000 kilometres from most African farms. Russia and Ukraine together had supplied more than half of the fertilizer imported by African nations. When that supply chain fractured, African agriculture fractured with it.
Prices that were already painful became catastrophic. Farmers who had been struggling to afford one bag of fertilizer could now afford none. Planting seasons were missed. Yields collapsed. Food prices rose. The World Food Programme reported acute food insecurity spikes directly attributable to fertilizer unavailability. This was not a natural disaster. It was a structural consequence of dependency — a dependency that every one of Africa’s governments had chosen, by omission, to maintain.
The geopolitical risks have not diminished. In 2024, China implemented significant fertilizer export restrictions to prioritise domestic supply, disrupting global supply chains and forcing African importers to seek more expensive spot-market alternatives. The European Union’s tariffs on Russian and Belarusian fertilizer imports — imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with Africa — redirected global supply flows and tightened the market for African buyers. Price projections for 2025 point to a further 30 per cent increase in urea costs.
Africa is a price-taker in a market it has the resources to dominate. Every external shock that hits the fertilizer market hits African farmers hardest, because African farmers have no domestic alternative. They cannot buy local. Local does not exist.
Consider Nigeria’s situation: the country possesses the largest natural gas reserves on the continent and has built three major urea production plants — Notore, Indorama, and Dangote — with a combined annual capacity of 6.5 million metric tonnes. Nigerian urea production reached 4.18 million tonnes in 2024. Yet despite this surplus, Nigeria remains Africa’s fourth-largest fertilizer importer, bringing in 737,822 tonnes of phosphate and potash products it cannot produce domestically. And where does Nigeria’s urea go? In 2024, 53 per cent of its urea exports went to Brazil. Exporting to Brazil while importing from Morocco while West African farmers go hungry. This is the madness of the current system.
IV. The Value Chain Capture: Who Profits From African Soil Poverty
The fertilizer dependency model is not neutral. It transfers wealth from African economies to external producers at scale and with extraordinary efficiency. Let us trace the flows.
Morocco’s OCP Group reported fertilizer exports of $12.63 billion in 2024. A significant share of this revenue was sourced from sales to African nations — nations that possess their own raw phosphate reserves but lack the processing infrastructure to convert them. Togo is the most illustrative case: the country produced 1.52 million tonnes of rock phosphate in 2023, earning foreign exchange from its export. It then imported 109,095 tonnes of finished fertilizer — 97 per cent of its NPK imports sourced from Morocco. The Togolese farmer’s soil minerals left the country, were processed elsewhere, and were sold back to her at a markup that reflects not only the cost of processing but the margin of a global commodity trader.
The systemic failure is not in mining. Mining generates some revenue. The systemic failure is in the absence of beneficiation — the processing, refining, and transformation of raw materials into finished agricultural inputs. The gap between the value of raw phosphate rock and the value of processed diammonium phosphate fertilizer is the gap between poverty and industrialisation. Africa ships the former and buys the latter.
This value chain capture is not unique to phosphate. The same dynamic applies to potash. Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression holds potash reserves that could supply the entire East African region. Instead, Kenya and Tanzania import muriate of potash from Canada and Russia at freight costs that dwarf the cost of the mineral itself. The value addition — the processing, the bagging, the logistics — is captured by external economies. African farmers pay for it in the price of every bag.
Africa has spent five decades exporting its agricultural sovereignty in the form of unprocessed minerals. The Nairobi Declaration of 2024 is the first serious attempt to buy it back. But declarations do not build factories.
V. The Nairobi Moment: A Framework That Demands Action
In May 2024, African Heads of State endorsed the Nairobi Declaration at the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit. The Declaration is ambitious. It commits the continent to tripling domestic production of both organic and inorganic fertilizers by 2034. It commits to doubling intra-African fertilizer trade by leveraging the African Continental Free Trade Area. It commits to ensuring that at least 70 per cent of smallholder farmers have access to targeted agronomic recommendations by 2034.
These are the right targets. The question is whether they will be backed by the right investments.
The supply-side argument for national fertilizer capacity is compelling on every axis. On the resource side, the raw materials are present. Tanzania holds 1.6 trillion cubic metres of natural gas and 375,100 tonnes of phosphate deposits. Mozambique holds 2.8 trillion cubic metres of natural gas. Uganda holds 230,000 tonnes of phosphate. These are not marginal deposits. They are industrial foundations. The manufacturing infrastructure to convert them into fertilizer is what is missing.
On the demand side, the market is enormous and growing. Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Feeding that population will require a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. Agricultural productivity, on the soil types that characterise much of Africa, requires fertilizer. The demand pull for domestic fertilizer production is not a projection. It is a mathematical certainty.
On the economic side, the import bill is itself an investment argument. If Ethiopia is spending the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars annually on fertilizer imports, and if those imports are subject to global price volatility that periodically doubles or triples their cost, then the capital expenditure required to build domestic production capacity — even at the scale needed to supply a nation of 120 million people — can be justified on import substitution grounds alone, before any export revenues are considered.
VI. What ‘Every Country Needs a Fertilizer Industry’ Actually Means
I am aware that the proposition — every African nation needs its own fertilizer production capacity — is not a statement about building a large integrated chemical plant in every country. It is a statement about a national fertilizer strategy: a deliberate, state-supported, private-sector-executed commitment to producing the nutrients that national agriculture requires, using the resources that national territory contains, in forms that national farmers can access at prices that national incomes can sustain.
For a country like Morocco or Egypt, this already exists at global scale. For Nigeria, it exists for nitrogen but not for phosphate and potash. For Tanzania, it means leveraging natural gas reserves to build a domestic urea capacity, while developing agricultural lime and gypsum from local secondary mineral sources — which my research confirms is already being explored. For Togo, it means ending the absurdity of exporting phosphate rock and importing NPK by building at minimum one processing facility capable of producing soluble phosphate fertilizer for domestic use.
The critical innovation that must accompany these investments is not technological. The technology exists. It is proven. The critical innovation is the policy architecture: investment incentives that favour fertilizer manufacturing; trade policy within the AfCFTA that creates intra-African fertilizer trade corridors; soil health data systems, such as those being developed under the Nairobi Declaration’s digital mapping commitments, that allow fertilizer to be formulated to specific soil conditions rather than applied generically; and smallholder access mechanisms — subsidy architectures, input credit programmes, cooperative purchasing models — that ensure the output of new domestic plants reaches the farmer who needs it, not just the large commercial operator who can afford it.
The green ammonia opportunity deserves particular emphasis. Egypt and Morocco are already pioneering the production of nitrogen fertilizers using renewable energy — solar and wind electrolysis rather than fossil gas. With Africa’s solar irradiance profile among the highest on the planet, the transition to green nitrogen production is not only environmentally sound. It is an economic decoupling from the natural gas price volatility that has historically made nitrogen fertilizer unaffordable in crisis years. Countries without gas reserves — which is most of Africa — can build nitrogen capacity through renewable energy. This is a new frontier, and it is Africa’s frontier to claim.
VII. The Political Economy of Inaction
If the case is this clear, why has it not been acted upon? The answer lies in the political economy of import dependency, which is comfortable for many of the actors who should be driving change.
Global fertilizer companies have no interest in financing African fertilizer manufacturing capacity that would reduce their export markets. Governments that depend on import duties and port fees from fertilizer shipments have a revenue interest in maintaining import flows. Development finance institutions have historically been reluctant to fund the capital-intensive, long-gestation infrastructure projects that fertilizer plants represent, preferring smaller, quicker-disbursing interventions. And African agricultural ministries, focused on the immediate problem of getting inputs to farmers next season, have rarely had the political bandwidth to pursue the decade-long investments that industrial policy requires.
This is the structural inertia that the Nairobi Declaration must overcome. Declarations are statements of intent. Industrial policy is the mechanism of execution. What Africa needs now — not in 2030, not at the next summit — is a continent-wide programme of national fertilizer development plans: country-by-country assessments of domestic resource endowments, domestic demand profiles, and the specific investment pathways required to build national production capacity within a ten-year horizon.
The AfCFTA provides the trade architecture. The Nairobi Declaration provides the policy mandate. The raw materials provide the industrial foundation. The financing — from African Development Bank blended instruments, from sovereign wealth of resource-rich nations, from patient private capital attracted by guaranteed offtake agreements — is available, if the political will exists to structure it.
The most expensive agricultural policy Africa can pursue is the one it is currently pursuing: buying its fertility from the world market, one crisis at a time, at prices it does not set and cannot predict.
VIII. The Soil Is Ours. The Industry Must Be Too.
I want to end where I began — with Togo’s phosphate, and the question it poses.
When a Togolese farmer walks to the input shop and pays for a bag of NPK that was manufactured from rock that came out of the ground beneath her feet, processed in a country 5,000 kilometres away, shipped back across an ocean, and sold to her at a markup that reflects every cost in that absurd journey — she is not simply buying fertilizer. She is paying a structural tax on the failure of her continent to industrialise its own resources. She is subsidising the profits of external commodity chains with the thin margins of her own small farm. She is, in the most literal possible sense, financing the wealth of others with the fertility of her own soil.
This is the agricultural model that Africa has inherited and has largely maintained. The Nairobi Declaration of 2024 is, at its core, a statement that this model must end. But ending it requires more than declarations. It requires the hard, unglamorous, politically complex work of building fertilizer industries — company by company, plant by plant, nation by nation — until the bag of fertilizer in the farmer’s hand was made from minerals dug in her country, processed by workers employed in her economy, and sold at a price that reflects the cost of production rather than the cost of dependency.
Africa possesses everything it needs to feed itself, except the industrial will to stop selling its raw materials and start feeding its own farms with its own factories. That is not a resource problem. It is a sovereignty problem. And sovereignty, unlike phosphate, is not something you can import.
Anthony Muchoki is the publisher of Kilimokwanza.org