Top 10 Fertilizer Stocks – Investing In Feeding The World

Forever Growing Needs

As the world population keeps rising, our need for more food is increasing as well. We will need to significantly grow more food by 2050 if we are to avoid food deprivation.

Source: USDA

In addition, growing incomes in both rich and poor countries increase the demand for meat, which requires additional calories from crops like soybeans and corn. So, the pattern of growing consumption observed in the USA, China, or Brazil is likely to repeat with the several billion people living in Africa, India, SE-Asia, etc.

Source: USDA

None of the current food production, and even less higher production in the future, would be possible without fertilizer. In fact, half of the global population depends on fertilizers.

Source: Our World In Data

Since the onset of the “Green Revolution” in the mid-20^th century, chemicals from pesticides and herbicides, but also plant nutrition (nitrogen, phosphate, potassium) have been vital in keeping production high enough.

As a result, the fertilizer industry can be seen as a very fundamental one and offers investors a stable sector in an increasingly unstable world.

The Science Of Fertilizers

The three main fertilizers are the so-called NPK fertilizers:

• N for nitrogen is produced by using a lot of energy to turn the atmospheric N2 into ammonia and nitrate.
• P for phosphorus, a resource that is mined from phosphorus-rich rock deposits.
• K for potassium (“kalium” in some languages), also mined.

Source: Fertilizers Europe

Besides the main NPK, other fertilizers contain secondary nutrients and micronutrients that plants need, but in small quantities, like calcium, sulfate, boron, zinc, molybdenum, iron, cobalt, and manganese.

The fertilizer market is massive, worth $208B in 2024, and expected to grow by 2.9% CAGR until 2034.

As we could expect due to its population, the Asia Pacific market is by far the largest, consuming half of the world’s fertilizers, followed by North America and Europe.

Source: Precedence Research

We can note that areas with large populations like Latin America (665 million people) and Africa & Middle East (1.3 billion people) make only a paltry 8% of global fertilizer consumption, illustrating how these regions might boost fertilizer consumption in the near future.

Source: Our World In Data

By far, the largest fertilizer producer is China, making up 25% of the world’s global, followed by Russia with 10%. Next are the USA, India, Canada, and Belarus.