With US agriculture reliant on foreign potash, Trump’s tariff moves against Canada appear to have no upsides, except for his friends in the Dictators’ Club.
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Imagine if the world had a finite amount of oxygen and each year it was painstakingly extracted from mines, loaded onto barges, trains, and freight trucks, and shipped across the globe so countries could distribute it to their citizens.
Now, imagine if just four countries controlled the majority of that oxygen — 77.7 percent, to be exact.
What oxygen is for humans, potash is for food crops.
Potash is a vital mineral, rich in potassium, and it’s an essential component of fertilizer. Without it, crops wither, succumb to disease, and suffer a dramatic drop in yields and nutritional quality. Potash is what keeps the global food supply growing and healthy.
And here’s the potash punchline: None of the countries controlling the global supply of potash is the US.
The world produces approximately 48 million metric tons of potash annually according to NASDAQ, and the US consumes about 15 percent of that total, or around 7.2 million metric tons per year. However, the US produces almost no potash itself. It imports more than 90 percent of its needs, the vast majority of which comes from one country: Canada, fortunately a staunch US ally — at least before Trump got jiggy about annexing it.
Dependent on foreign potash as it is, the US is highly vulnerable to price changes and supply disruptions, especially when geopolitical tensions escalate.
In 1969, one of those outbursts of geopolitical tension prompted the US to slap tariffs on Canadian potash, over fears about “dumping” of a perilous commodity in the American market. The result? Higher costs for US farmers and consumers.
President Richard Nixon eventually backed off, but the political damage was already done. It fueled distrust, led to prolonged trade negotiations, and influenced future trade policies, including the eventual Canada-US Free Trade Agreement.
Fast-forward to February 1, 2025, when the US imposed a new 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada, including potash. Then President Donald Trump threatened to double that tariff to 50 percent. Of course, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow — and the day after and the day after that — to see whether Trump has stuck with that threat, or backed off, or doubled it again. As the world and its markets watch the Trump Tariff Yo-Yo in disbelief — if chaos is not the point, it’s hard to discern what is.
Without Canadian potash, America’s food supply would be at the mercy of three other countries that have somewhat more fraught diplomatic relations with the US: Russia, Belarus, and China. All together, these countries control the following shares of global production:
- Canada: 15 million metric tons (31.3 percent)
- Russia: 9 million metric tons (18.8 percent)
- Belarus: 7 million metric tons (14.6 percent)
- China: 6.3 million metric tons (13.1 percent)
These four countries add up to the aforementioned 77.7 percent of the total global production So, should the US lose access to Canadian potash, it will have no choice but to turn to Russia, Belarus, and/or China — hardly ideal options, considering the current geopolitical situation.
Is There Any Method to This Madness?
Trump’s tariff “strategy,” if we can call it that, does nothing to dispel growing suspicion that the American president is beholden to and, one way or another, working for the benefit of the Russian president.
That leaves one question: Is Trump’s seeming eagerness to wreck the US economy and upset global markets and food supply just a general favor to dictators — Canada being the only country of the Potash Top Four that is not run by one — or a special favor to Vlad?
