Canada now supplies over half of Brazil's potash imports

Canada now supplies 54.6% of everything Brazil imported in potassium fertilizer through the first half of 2026 — the same window a year earlier, that share stood at 35.6%. More than half the potash reaching Brazilian farmland today comes out of a Canadian mine.

How Canada became the majority supplier

In dollar terms, Brazil's potash imports from Canada totaled $166.7 million in the first half of 2026. Canada's share moved from just over a third to more than half of total imports in that same comparable window — year over year (YoY). Brazil doesn't produce potash at meaningful scale: it's the world's largest importer of the input, essential for soybeans, sugarcane and corn, and depends almost entirely on a handful of countries with sylvite deposits.

The backdrop is familiar: since the war in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — which together once supplied close to 40% of global potash — have sat under Western sanctions that restricted access for buyers like Brazil. Canada, home to the world's largest sylvite reserves in Saskatchewan, absorbed much of the demand left orphaned.

What this changes on the ground for buyers

For Brazilian distributors and farm cooperatives, concentration in a single supplier raises the risk from any isolated logistics event — a port strike in Vancouver, a rail disruption on the Canadian Prairies, or a delayed transatlantic shipment now has direct, immediate impact on domestic input pricing, with no quick substitute available. Distance also matters: Canadian potash travels a longer sea route than Russian or Belarusian supply once did, which historically pushed up the input's freight-inclusive cost (CIF) — an effect that part of the recent rise in FOB value may indirectly reflect.

On the currency side, fertilizer is one of the farm inputs most sensitive to dollar swings, since growers pay in reais (BRL) for a dollar-denominated input before they've even sold the harvest — any added FX volatility compounds the risk of concentrated supply.

What to watch from here

Worth tracking whether Nutrien and Mosaic, Canada's two largest potash miners, hold enough spare capacity to sustain this export pace without pressuring price — and whether Brazil can unlock alternative supply, including its own Autazes potash exploration project in the Amazon region, still in licensing. Another factor to monitor: whether the BRL/USD exchange rate stays stable enough to avoid amplifying this imported input's cost ahead of the next planting cycle.