Fertilizer

The survey lets us put an exact price on the shock. A median one-acre farmer needs about two bags of fertilizer per season and, before the crisis, earned a net income of roughly KES 9,420 at a KES 38/kg farmgate maize price. At the pre-crisis fertilizer price of KES 2,800 a bag, two bags cost KES 5,600 — affordable enough that around 90% of farmers applied fertilizer.

Each supply scenario pushes that cost up. Russian-sourced urea at crisis pricing raises two bags to roughly KES 6,980 (+38%), and application is expected to fall to about 75% of farmers. Dangote Nigerian urea lands at KES 7,618 for two bags — still 69% of an entire pre-crisis net income, with application dropping to around 68%. Blocked Gulf pricing, if the product could be found at all, would cost KES 10,232 for two bags, +83%, collapsing application to roughly 25%. The chart shows how each sourcing decision maps to a different affordability cliff, and why the choice of supplier is, in effect, a choice about how many farmers fertilize at all.

To understand who absorbs a fertilizer price shock, you have to look at the structure of a typical farm budget. The Strathmore University AgriFood survey of 1,220 farmers across nine counties found a median maize producer working a single acre, 46.5 years old, with 20 years of experience and a household of five. Critically, half of these farmers are pure subsistence growers who plant maize to eat, not to sell — the population most exposed to any input shock.

Their median production cost is just KES 11,100 per acre, and the chart breaks down where each shilling goes. Labour is the largest line at roughly 36%, but most of it is unpaid family work (the median cash labour cost is zero). Seeds take 26%, and inorganic fertilizer 23% — at pre-crisis prices. Because fertilizer is one of the few items that must be paid for in cash, a price rise hits the binding constraint directly: 72% of surveyed farmers already name inadequate finance as their primary obstacle to better farming.

The crop calendar decides which season absorbs the damage, and that timing is what separates a difficult year from an emergency. The MAM 2026 long rains are partially protected because basal DAP — Morocco-sourced and not Hormuz-exposed — was mostly applied in March–April before the price shock fully transmitted to farmgate (a documented four-month lag). The damage there is concentrated in the May–June urea topdress window. The OND 2026 short rains are far more exposed: both basal DAP and urea topdress will be purchased at full crisis-peak prices simultaneously, on top of reduced planting area from depressed MAM incomes.

Modelling these dynamics against KNBS crop statistics and the survey yield-response curve produces a fan of outcomes. The 2024 actual of 4.03M MT is the reference. The modal Base case lands near 3.28M MT without a Dangote contract, an 18.5% fall. Securing 70,000 MT of Dangote urea shifts the most likely outcome up to the Best case of 3.66M MT. The Downside (2.96M MT) drops below the 2022 crisis low, and the Worst case (2.61M MT) reaches historical emergency levels. The chart arrays every scenario against the 2024 baseline and the 2022 crisis line, showing how much hangs on a single procurement decision.

The widely quoted figure that Hormuz affects "26% of Kenya's fertilizer imports" is a basket average that badly understates the real risk, because it blends resilient products with the one that is acutely exposed. Fertilizer is not a single commodity: DAP is the basal phosphate applied at planting, sourced mainly from Morocco; MOP/potash comes from Belarus, Germany and Jordan; and urea is the nitrogen topdress applied to maize at the silking stage that determines final grain fill.

When you separate urea out of the basket and look at it alone, the picture is severe. Gulf sourcing of urea ranged from 73.5% in 2019 to a peak of 98.3% in 2023 — meaning that in its worst year, all but a sliver of the nitrogen fertilizer Kenyan maize depends on came from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Diversification began in 2024 (80.9%) as Russia entered the urea trade, and by mid-2025 Gulf share had fallen to 60.7%. The chart tracks this trajectory year by year, and the headline it tells is that the Hormuz closure is not a 26% problem — for nitrogen topdress it is close to a blockade.

The crisis was visible in the monthly import data months before the Strait of Hormuz formally closed, which is what makes this series so important: it shows a buffer already draining, not a shock arriving out of nowhere. Through early 2025, imports tracked roughly in line with 2024. Then in May 2025 a single massive 105,686 MT shipment landed, including 59,050 MT of Russian urea — the largest single-month Russian urea delivery on record and an unmistakable signal of importers front-loading ahead of anticipated disruption.

The very next month told the opposite story. June 2025 crashed to 30,402 MT — 68% below June 2024, with zero DAP and only 9,100 MT of urea — the lowest monthly total since December 2016. This is not seasonal variation; it is a pipeline running dry. Kenya's 2024 buffer stock of 110,865 MT, equal to about 15% of annual use, was already being drawn down by mid-2025. The chart plots each month against the prior-year baseline, and the May spike followed by the June collapse is the clearest possible evidence that the country entered the Hormuz closure with depleted reserves rather than a cushion.

Maize dominates the fertilizer conversation because it is the staple, but the shock radiates across the whole cropping system, and the spread of damage follows one simple rule: the more urea-intensive and single-sourced a crop is, the harder it is hit. The brief estimates a base-case loss for each major sector under the no-Dangote scenario, and the differences are large.

Sugarcane is the most exposed in absolute terms, losing an estimated 870,000 MT (−15%) because it is heavily nitrogen-dependent. Wheat carries the highest percentage loss at −17.5%, compounding a crop Kenya already imports 90% of. Potatoes (−12.5%), tea (−10%, about 57,000 MT) and horticulture (−7.5%) sit in the moderate band, while coffee (−8.5%) and especially sorghum and millet (−4%) are the most resilient — low-input crops that may even gain from substitution as maize prices rise. Across all crops the aggregate loss is roughly 1.95M MT, about −15%, with more than USD 377M of export value at risk concentrated in tea and horticulture. The chart ranks each crop's tonnage loss, turning an abstract input shock into a concrete map of where the sector bleeds.

Every element of the crisis ultimately resolves into one commercial question: where should Kenya buy its emergency urea, and what does each option cost delivered to Mombasa? The brief assembles full landed-cost economics — FOB price plus crisis freight plus handling — for six origins, and the ranking reframes the whole problem as a logistics and procurement decision rather than a supply shortage.

Nigerian Dangote urea lands at roughly KES 3,809 per 50kg bag via a 29-day Cape of Good Hope route that bypasses Hormuz, the Red Sea and Suez entirely. Russia (KES 3,490) and China (KES 3,471) are marginally cheaper but carry political or quota risk; Egypt is limited by volume. The blocked Gulf options — Qatar (KES 5,116) and Saudi Arabia (KES 5,284) — are both far more expensive and unavailable. Dangote sits about KES 1,307 per bag below blocked-Gulf pricing, a USD 14.1M saving on a 70,000 MT contract that uses just 5.6% of Nigeria's exportable surplus. The chart compares delivered cost across all six origins, making visible why the recommended strategy treats Dangote as the priority swing supplier: it is among the cheapest available, the most chokepoint-insulated, and large enough to move Kenya's entire 2026 outcome.

Where Kenya buys its fertilizer changed completely in the years before the 2026 crisis — and that pre-existing transition shapes every part of the country's room to respond. For most of the 2010s, Saudi Arabia was the dominant supplier, peaking at 271,200 MT in 2018, equal to 43% of all fertilizer imports that year. By the first seven months of 2025 that had collapsed to 78,170 MT, a 71% decline driven by Saudi producer MAADEN's pricing strategy, rising Saudi domestic demand, and Kenyan importers actively switching to cheaper origins.

Into that gap stepped Russia's PhosAgro, which grew from 108,018 MT in 2018 to 243,802 MT in 2023, becoming Kenya's single largest supplier. Morocco's OCP Africa surged during the 2022 price-shock year as the primary DAP source, and Tanzania emerged as a new transit corridor through the Dar es Salaam hub. The chart contrasts each origin's 2024 volume against the old 2018 Saudi benchmark, showing a supply map that had already been redrawn before any chokepoint closed.

A fertilizer shortage is not a proportional yield shortage — the relationship between how much fertilizer goes on and how much grain comes off is strongly nonlinear, and that shape determines exactly where rationing does the most damage. Drawing on 546 comparable one-acre farms, the survey measured median maize yield across six application bands, from near-zero use up to intensive commercial rates.

At the subsistence floor of 25 kg/acre, yield is just 1,334 kg/ha. Moving to the 50–100 kg/acre band lifts it to 2,224 kg/ha — a 67% gain that the analysis identifies as the "sweet spot," the point of steepest marginal return per shilling spent. Beyond that, full recommended rates push yields above 3,400 kg/ha but with clearly diminishing returns. The single most striking finding sits underneath all the bands: subsidy users achieve 37% higher median yield than non-subsidy users, which tells us the binding constraint is affordability, not agronomic knowledge. Farmers know what to do; they cannot always pay to do it. The chart visualises this curve and the subsidy premium, making clear why protecting access to even a moderate dose matters far more than the headline tonnage suggests.