Iran war boosted Russian fertiliser revenues by over £5m a day

Posted: 6th August 2026

Hello all. Lucy Jordan here, dipping in from our summer newsletter hiatus to let you know that Unearthed has a new story out today, with The i Paper.

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Iran war boosted Russian fertiliser revenues by over £5m a day

Russian companies made an estimated £500m windfall – an average £5m per day – from one type of fertiliser alone this spring, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran war sent global prices soaring.

The narrow Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint for fertiliser. It usually handles a third of global seaborne fertiliser trade and a fifth of natural gas shipments, needed to make nitrogen fertilisers such as urea. The blockade has meant that major producers of fertiliser in the Gulf such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia have had their supply chains severely curtailed. Experts have warned that the disruption in fuel and fertiliser supplies threatens to tip millions of the world’s poorest people into hunger.

But Russia, the world’s leading nitrogen fertiliser exporter, uses Baltic ports, which are unaffected by the Iran conflict. Moreover, it has a constant supply of cheap, home-grown natural gas to make urea, the most widely used fertiliser.

The disruption sent urea prices shooting upwards – almost doubling from late February to late April. We crunched pricing and trade data, and found that this price shock provided an estimated £500m boost for Russian companies above what they would have made at pre-war prices in the first three months of the conflict.

What’s more, almost half the windfall – an estimated £225m – was from one country: the US. While the US’s war in Iran sent prices soaring in March and April, it was buying record-breaking volumes of urea from Russia.

As one US analyst put it, “There’s an irony [in] ostensibly condemning Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, and this war that’s been going on for several years now, but at the same time buying fertiliser products from them.”