Until now, African farmers navigating fertiliser shortages have mostly been dealing with logistics and procurement failures – frustrating, but manageable. What is coming for the 2026–2027 planting seasons is neither logistical nor manageable. It is structural, and it is of a different order entirely.
Global urea production is down 11%, with a further 4% at immediate risk. Africa, running on 4% of global supply, is not facing a more expensive import season – it is facing no import season.
The standard framing – fertiliser prices up, food prices follow – described the 2022 crisis accurately. It is dangerously misleading this time. An industry running at 80–85% utilisation globally has no surge capacity. When 12 MT of annual production capacity is destroyed – taking months if not years to rebuild – and another 10 MT is curtailed by input shortages, the shortfall persists across the affected seasons – it cannot simply be recovered when inputs return.
When supply falls, demand is forced to fall with it. The price goes up to the point where it excludes buyers who cannot afford the clearing price. Africa’s smallholder farmers are always last in the queue – and in a market this tight, that means no supply at all. They will not simply pay more. they will be shut out of the market entirely. Expanding African urea production will not solve this immediate supply shortage. Building new African urea capacity is a reasonable long-term ambition – but it will not help a single farmer in 2026 or 2027.
New capacity requires long lead times and substantial capital investment. And even when built, urea is a globally traded commodity: local production does not guarantee local access, because producers sell at global market price. In a supply-constrained market, domestically produced urea competes with the same deep-pocketed international buyers that are already crowding out African importers.
An African fertiliser supply chain
The only supply chain Africa fully controls is the one it builds from its own soil. Soil amendments made from local agricultural inputs – biochar, bio-stimulants, compost blends – are not traded on global commodity markets. They cannot be priced out by stronger buyers. For the planting seasons that matter now, they are the only supply chain Africa actually controls. Accelerating their production now, builds agency and resilience to future shocks.
The evidence for these alternatives is already compelling. Biochar combined with compost and half-rate synthetic fertiliser increased maize yields by 106% in 2023 and 127% in 2024 versus unfertilised controls in Northern Ghana – outperforming full-rate chemical fertiliser applied alone. A global dataset of 367 peer-reviewed studies across 37 countries confirms biochar consistently improves yields, with the strongest effects in tropical soils. These alternatives and supplements can make scarcely available synthetic fertiliser achieve more, and help rebuild soil health over time.
The underlying soil conditions amplify the supply shock. Around 75–80% of Africa’s cultivated land is already degraded. Approximately $4bn in soil nutrients are lost to erosion each year. Synthetic fertiliser applied to degraded, acidic soils consistently underperforms expectations. The access crisis lands on a base that was already failing.
If the right actors move now, this crisis could accelerate an industry that would otherwise take a decade to build: pyrolysis facilities, agricultural waste collection, blending, distribution, agronomic advisory. That industry is locally anchored by design – built from inputs that are structurally immune to the commodity pricing dynamics that created this crisis, supporting the 50 million smallholder families who produce 80% of Africa’s food, and retaining value on the continent rather than exporting it as commodity rents.
If that window closes – as global supply normalises and systems revert to synthetic defaults – the continent remains just as exposed to the next shock.
Let’s build Africa’s resilience from waste.
Yemi Osinbajo is the immediate former vice president of Nigeria and chair of the Climate Action Platform for Africa (CAP-A).
James Irungu Mwangi is the CEO of Africa Climate Ventures (ACV) and founder of CAP-A.