Oman now supplies 1 in 5 dollars of Brazil's nitrogen fertilizer

Oman closed 2025 supplying 20.0% of everything Brazil imported in nitrogen fertilizer — more than double the 8.8% share the Gulf country held a year earlier. In absolute terms, the jump pushed the supplier to $129.8 million in FOB (price before freight) for the year, according to the MDIC ComexStat trade panel. Oman wasn't a new name on the list, but it turned into an essential one within twelve months.

The scoreboard

Nitrogen fertilizer is a commodity-crop input — without it, corn and sugarcane yields drop fast. Brazil imports most of what it uses, and the supplier list has shifted considerably in recent years as sanctions, natural-gas bottlenecks, and ocean freight reshuffle the board among Russia, Canada, Egypt, and Gulf producers. Oman, historically a secondary name on that list, caught the window. With cheap natural gas and modern petrochemical plants at the Sohar industrial complex, the country converted idle capacity into signed contracts with Brazilian trading houses.

What changes on the ground

For Brazilian buyers, one more relevant supplier means less bargaining power concentrated in the hands of traditional exporters — the opposite of what happens when a market consolidates. But 20% dependence on a single Gulf partner is also a risk: any logistics disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, or a shift in Muscat's export policy, would tighten available supply quickly. Cooperatives and wholesale distributors buying nitrogen fertilizer now track Oman as a pricing variable, not a footnote.

Currency dynamics helped make the purchase attractive: the Brazilian real held relatively steady against the dollar through 2025, keeping import costs predictable for growers just as the second corn crop needed nitrogen applied within a tight field window.

What to watch from here

There's no forecast data to say whether Oman keeps growing or whether this was an unusual contract year. Two signals are worth tracking: whether Russia — historically Brazil's largest nitrogen fertilizer supplier — recovers lost ground in 2026, and whether the Sohar complex still has room to expand or was already running near capacity in 2025. As we showed in Brazil's refined oil exports to Poland jump 7x, Gulf suppliers with surplus gas have repeated this exact playbook across other petrochemical chains.