3 min readMar 4, 2026 06:00 AM IST First published on: Mar 4, 2026 at 06:00 AM ISTAmong the major sectors likely to be disproportionately impacted by the ongoing US-Israel vs Iran war, and which has implications for India’s food security, is fertilisers. India imports a fourth of its urea consumption and nearly 40 per cent of that from West Asia. The domestically produced urea, too, is mostly based on imported natural gas, again up to 85 per cent sourced from the likes of Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. India’s import dependence is still more in phosphatic and potassic fertilisers, including their raw materials and intermediates such as rock phosphate, sulphur, ammonia and phosphoric acid. Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries had already led to a key global sulphur supplier banning exports and driving up world prices. And with the war in Iran (which is itself a leading exporter of urea and ammonia) disrupting gas shipments, things cannot get worse.The last time India had seen international prices of fertilisers go through the roof, in line with that of oil and gas, was in the run-up to and post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago. India has also had problems from China, which, until 2023-24, was its largest supplier of urea and di-ammonium phosphate (DAP). Indian agriculture, in that sense, has become as vulnerable to geopolitical risks, whether from wars or import dependence on China, as to climate change. Policymakers need to find ways to manage and mitigate both, which calls for a strategic, as opposed to firefighting, approach.AdvertisementThe government has frozen the retail price of urea (at Rs 5,922 per tonne since November 2012) and DAP (at Rs 27,000/tonne since the Covid-19 pandemic). The underpricing has resulted in unrestrained consumption, with sales of urea alone rising from under 30 million tonnes (mt) in 2017-18 to a projected 40 mt this fiscal. Farmers at one time had to be incentivised to use chemical fertilisers for boosting crop yields. Today, they must be discouraged from over-application and be made aware that India imports half of its natural gas requirement — which will only go up — and hardly has any mineable rock phosphate, potash or elemental sulphur reserves. Capping consumption of urea and DAP, promoting high nutrient-use fertilisers amenable to targeted delivery through drip irrigation system or foliar application, and providing subsidy on a per-acre rather than product-specific basis is the way forward. The Narendra Modi government’s Agri Stack initiative, to create unique digital IDs for all farmers and link these to their land records and cropping data, can be the right platform for it.