Yara International, which operates in more than 60 countries, buys considerable amounts of essential raw materials from Russia. Yara’s boss, Svein Tore Holsether, told BBC, “We were already in a difficult situation before the war... and now it’s additional disruption to the supply chains, and we’re getting close to the most important part of this season for the Northern Hemisphere, where a lot of fertilizer needs to move, and that will quite likely be impacted.” He added, “For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it’s how large the crisis will be.”
Russia is not only producer of some 15% of fertilizers worldwide, but enormous amounts of nutrients, like potash and phosphate — key ingredients in fertilizers. Holsether said, “Half the world’s population gets food as a result of fertilizers... and if that’s removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%.”
In fact, Yara is among the large multinational fertilizer cartels which had sharply raised fertilizer prices, out of the reach of many farmers, before Russia took any military move against Ukraine. Other companies in the cartel had also gotten penalty tariffs placed on Russian, as well as several other countries’ fertilizers exports.
https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-war-catastrophic-global-food-001443915.html
