In March 1952, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the Sindri fertiliser factory in present-day Jharkhand, he called it a “temple of modern India”. The phrase captured the mood of a young republic trying to emerge from centuries of hunger, colonial underdevelopment, and chronic food shortages through planned industrialisation.
India at independence was an overwhelmingly agrarian country, yet its agriculture remained technologically backward and perilously vulnerable to droughts, famines and low productivity. Farmers relied mainly on cattle manure, compost, crop residue, and green manure. Fertiliser use was minimal. Domestic production capacity was almost nonexistent.
In the 1950s and 1960s, India depended heavily on imports, particularly American grain shipments under the PL-480 programme. The fear of famine hovered over policymaking. The state viewed fertiliser not merely as an industrial commodity but as a strategic instrument of survival.
That anxiety shaped the next seven decades of Indian agriculture.
The rise of the fertiliser economy
Sindri was India’s first major state-owned fertiliser plant. It produced ammonium sulphate and later became the country’s first producer of urea and ammonium nitrate-sulphate. It also had its own captive power plant. In many ways, it became the prototype for the fertiliser economy India would build after independence. The Fertiliser Corporation of India was established in 1961. Over time, large state-linked enterprises such as Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers, IFFCO, and KRIBHCO emerged as central pillars of the agricultural policy. Plants were built across the country at Nangal, Trombay, Hazira, Namrup, Jagdishpur, Talcher, and Ramagundam.
But the real rupture came with the Green Revolution in the late 1960s. India introduced high-yielding variety seeds, irrigation, pesticides, mechanisation, and intensive fertiliser use. Foodgrain output surged. Wheat and rice production climbed sharply. India gradually moved away from dependence on imported grain. Yet the Green Revolution created a new dependence even as it solved an old one.
The new seed varieties required large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Traditional farming systems had operated through organic nutrient cycles and mixed cropping patterns. The new model depended on industrial chemical inputs delivered at scale. That dependence now stretches far beyond Indian farms. It reaches deep into shipping corridors, gas fields, mineral deposits, and geopolitical fault lines spread across the globe.
The urea trap
Over time, fertiliser consumption in India rose exponentially. But the growth was distorted. Successive governments heavily subsidised urea because nitrogen produced rapid visible gains in crop yield. Urea became politically untouchable. Prices were kept artificially low even as phosphatic and potassic fertilisers became costlier after partial liberalisation in the 1990s.
Farmers used more nitrogen and less phosphorus and potassium. The recommended nutrient ratio of 4:2:1 remained grossly ignored in favour of nitrogen. The result was declining soil health, micronutrient deficiencies, falling organic carbon, and lower nutrient efficiency. Indian agriculture entered a vicious cycle. In many regions, excessive nitrogen application degraded soil quality so severely that farmers now require more fertiliser merely to maintain previous output levels. What began as a productivity revolution slowly became an entrenched dependency.
The geological constraint
The common political narrative often frames fertiliser imports as a policy failure. The reality is more complicated. India lacks substantial reserves of phosphate rock and potash. It also lacks abundant cheap natural gas, which is essential for producing ammonia and urea.
India imports almost all of its potash requirements. A large portion of phosphatic fertiliser demand is also met through imports. Even domestically manufactured urea often depends on imported LNG as feedstock. This creates layered vulnerability. India imports finished fertilisers such as DAP and MOP. It also imports the raw materials required to manufacture fertilisers inside India, including natural gas, phosphoric acid, ammonia, sulphur, and rock phosphate.
So the phrase “domestic production” can obscure more than it reveals. A urea plant located in Gorakhpur or Ramagundam may still rely on imported LNG arriving through Gulf shipping routes. The factory is Indian. The nutrient chain is not.
The Guardian’s investigation into the 2026 Gulf blockade argued that modern agriculture has quietly become dependent on an extremely narrow logistical architecture. About one-third of global trade in fertiliser raw materials passes through the Strait of Hormuz, alongside nearly 20% of global LNG shipments.
This means the world food system is now tied not only to rainfall and soil fertility, but to maritime chokepoints, tanker insurance rates, naval tensions, and wars in the Gulf.
Why Hormuz matters more than oil
Public discussion of the Strait of Hormuz usually revolves around oil. But the fertiliser economy reveals a deeper and less visible vulnerability. The Gulf today is not merely an energy-producing region. It has become one of the hidden foundations of global agriculture itself. Countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Oman possess enormous natural gas reserves, making them among the world’s cheapest producers of ammonia and urea. West Asia also supplies nearly half of global sulphur trade, a critical raw material for fertiliser production.
Meanwhile, Morocco dominates phosphate reserves through the OCP Group. Canada and Russia dominate potash. India possesses none of these geological advantages. The Hormuz disruption of 2026 exposed this reality with unusual clarity. After military escalation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, shipping traffic through the Strait slowed dramatically. Fertiliser cargoes stalled. LNG shipments tightened. Insurance premiums surged. Only a trickle of vessels carrying ammonia, nitrogen, and sulphur continued moving through the corridor.
The consequences spread rapidly through global agriculture. The world’s largest single-site urea export complex, Qatar’s QAFCO facility, reportedly went largely offline during the crisis. Urea prices surged by more than 60% within weeks. Analysts warned that the effects of the blockade would not appear immediately on supermarket shelves but during the next agricultural season, when farmers would reduce fertiliser application because of shortages and soaring prices.
A crisis beyond oil
India was among the countries most exposed to this chain reaction. It imports crude oil through the Strait. But it also depends on Hormuz-linked routes for LNG, ammonia, urea, sulphur and phosphatic fertilisers. During the 2026 crisis, fertiliser plants reportedly received reduced gas allocations as LNG supplies tightened. Urea output slowed just months before the Kharif sowing season.
India’s fertiliser requirement for Kharif exceeds 390 lakh metric tonnes. The danger was not immediate collapse. India maintained reserve stocks of urea, DAP, MOP and complex fertilisers. But the crisis exposed how fragile the broader system remains. Higher global prices increased subsidy burdens. Shipping congestion delayed deliveries. Insurance and freight costs rose sharply. Logistics chains became erratic. Farmers feared shortages and price increases. Export-oriented crops such as rice, cotton, and soybeans faced uncertainty.
The deeper problem, however, lay elsewhere. India often speaks of food self-sufficiency because it produces enough grain domestically. But food sovereignty built on imported nutrients remains structurally incomplete. The wheat may be grown in Punjab. The nitrogen feeding that wheat may still originate in Gulf gas fields.
Fertilisers are now among the most strategically important commodities in the world economy because they connect energy systems directly to food systems. When gas flows are disrupted, food production itself becomes vulnerable.
Countries such as the United States entered the crisis with larger domestic stocks and greater fertiliser self-sufficiency. Much of Europe had already secured fertiliser purchases before the blockade intensified. But countries in South Asia and Africa faced far greater exposure because they depend heavily on continuous imports moving through Gulf routes.
The crisis therefore exposed an uncomfortable truth about globalisation. Modern agriculture may appear nationally organised, but its material foundations are profoundly internationalised. A disruption in one maritime corridor can reverberate through farms thousands of kilometres away within weeks.
Can India reduce fertiliser use quickly?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly called for balanced fertiliser use and reduction of excessive chemical dependency. The broad direction is sensible. But translating that into immediate reality is difficult.
India’s agricultural system is structurally built around chemical fertilisers. The wheat-rice belts of Punjab and Haryana, which anchor India’s food procurement system, depend heavily on high nutrient application. Abrupt reduction would trigger major yield declines.
There are no easy substitutes available at scale. Organic manure and compost require time, labour, and logistics. Biofertilisers remain underdeveloped. Precision nutrient management exists unevenly. Soil health card programmes have had mixed implementation. Meanwhile, subsidies create their own political trap. Indian farmers pay among the world’s lowest prices for urea. The state absorbs the difference through enormous subsidy expenditure. Cheap fertiliser encourages overuse, smuggling and diversion to non-agricultural sectors. Yet raising prices sharply could provoke political backlash and hurt farm incomes.
Search for alternatives
India is now pursuing multiple pathways simultaneously.
Neem-coated urea has already become mandatory to improve nitrogen efficiency. Nano-urea, promoted by IFFCO, aims to reduce bulk fertiliser use through concentrated delivery mechanisms. Single superphosphate production is being expanded because it can rely partly on domestic inputs. Soil-health-card based precision farming is being encouraged to reduce blanket application practices.
There are also more ambitious projects. India is exploring potash extraction from saline lakes and seawater. Public sector companies hold overseas stakes in phosphate assets in Jordan and Tunisia. The Talcher coal gasification project seeks to reduce LNG dependence through coal-based ammonia production, though environmental concerns remain significant.
Then there is green ammonia.
If ammonia can eventually be produced using renewable electricity rather than natural gas, India could partially loosen the Gulf’s grip over its nitrogen economy. The technology is promising but expensive. The transition will take years, perhaps decades. For now, India remains suspended between two realities. One is the ecological exhaustion created by decades of chemical-intensive farming. The other is the inescapable dependence of food security on those very chemicals.
The Hormuz crisis revealed how narrow the margin really is. A conflict thousands of kilometres away did not merely threaten fuel prices. It threatened the nutrient chain feeding one of the largest agricultural systems on earth. And as climate shocks, wars, sanctions, shipping disruptions, and energy crises become more frequent, one question hangs more heavily over Indian agriculture than ever before: can a country of 1.4 billion people truly claim food sovereignty when the fertility of its soil depends so profoundly on some of the world’s most volatile geopolitical corridors?