Potash K
What it is for
Potash is one of the three nutrients a crop cannot do without, alongside nitrogen and phosphate. Unlike copper or lithium it is not an input to a manufactured good but to food itself, which puts its price closer to the cost of eating than to the cost of building. When potash rises, it arrives in food prices a season later.
What it costs
Where it sits in the chain
The chain is short and the geography is unusually narrow. Potash is mined from ancient evaporite beds that exist in commercial quantity in very few places, and is applied to fields with little processing in between. Canada, Russia and Belarus account for most of world supply, and two of those three have been subject to sanctions during the period this price series covers — which is visible in the series as a price spike that had nothing to do with geology.
Who has it
| Country | Production | Reserves | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canada | 15,000 | 1,100,000 | 2024 |
| Russian Federation | 9,000 | 920,000 | 2024 |
| Belarus | 7,000 | 750,000 | 2024 |
| China | 6,300 | 180,000 | 2024 |
| Germany | 3,000 | 150,000 | 2024 |
| Israel | 2,400 | — | 2024 |
| Jordan | 1,800 | — | 2024 |
| Lao PDR | 1,500 | 1,000,000 | 2024 |
| Chile | 750 | 100,000 | 2024 |
| United States | 420 | 220,000 | 2024 |
Production and reserves in thousand tonnes of potassium oxide equivalent; price in US dollars per tonne.
The demand side. Compare with the production table: the countries that mine potash are largely not the countries that spread it.
Reported by the seller, summed across every destination. Three countries account for most of it, which is what makes potash a concentration story rather than a price one.
Reported by the buyer. The two charts count the same shipments from opposite ends and do not agree exactly; where they differ, the disagreement is the finding.
The largest single flows, drawn from seller to buyer. The statistic is filed by the importer, so the left-hand side is the counterpart it names as the origin.
How concentrated it is
Three countries are most of world supply, and the production table now shows how narrow that is: Canada mines about 15 million tonnes of potassium oxide equivalent, Russia 9 million and Belarus 7 million. China, Germany and Israel follow well behind. Two of the top three have been under sanctions during the period this price series covers, which is why the price spike in it has a political rather than a geological explanation — a concentration of supply that is also a concentration of exposure. The demand side is the mirror image and is now loaded: Brazil applies about 8.9 million tonnes of potash a year and China 8.7 million, while Canada — which mines 15 million — uses under a million at home. Potash is not a commodity that gets consumed where it is found, which is what makes the concentration of supply a matter for everybody else's harvest.
What this cannot show
The price benchmark refers to a standard grade delivered to a particular market, while potash is traded largely on annual contracts negotiated between a handful of producers and a handful of buyers, so the published number is closer to an assessment than to a market clearing price. Reserves are a commercial judgement rather than a physical count: they describe what is economically extractable at prevailing prices, so a reserve figure can rise when the price does without a gram of new ore being found.
Other resources
Copper · Lithium · Cobalt · Nickel · Phosphate · Iron ore · Aluminium · Zinc · Tin