EU increases Russian fertilizer imports by 12% in Jan - Eurostat

MOSCOW. March 21 (Interfax) - The European Union increased imports of Russian fertilizer by 12% year-on-year to 0.5 million tonnes in January, the highest figure since last August, data from EU statistics agency Eurostat showed.

Russia remained the largest supplier of fertilizer to the European market in January, with a share of 26%, followed by Egypt and Morocco.

EU imports of Russian fertilizer by value rose by almost 20% year-on-year to 163.5 million euros in January.

Last year, several European countries urged the EU to impose prohibitive import duties on fertilizer from Russia and Belarus amid growing imports. In January 2025, the European Commission proposed to gradually increase, over a period of three years, import duties on nitrogen and compound fertilizers from these two countries to a prohibitive level.

A draft European Parliament resolution proposes to impose an additional import duty of 40 euros per tonne on top of the current ad valorem duty of 6.5% on nitrogen fertilizer as of July 1, 2025. This specific duty would then be raised to 60 euros per tonne in July 2026, 80 euros in July 2027 and 315 euros in July 2028.

For compound fertilizers, the specific duty would be 45 euros per tonne as of July 1, 2025, and then it would be raised to 70 euros, 95 euros and 430 euros, respectively, in the subsequent three years.

In the three-year transition period, the maximum duty will be in effect on EU imports of Russian and Belarusian fertilizer in excess of the quotas of 2.7 million tonnes in the period from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026; 1.8 million tonnes from July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027; and 0.9 million tonnes from July 1, 2027 to June 30, 2028.

Eurostat data show that the EU increased imports of Russian fertilizer by a quarter to 4.9 million tonnes in 2024.