The National Farmers Union has written to the House of Commons Agriculture Committee asking it to investigate fertilizer pricing.
“Fertilizer prices have skyrocketed over the past 6 months, and we want to know why”, said Don Ciparis, President of the Ontario Branch of the National Farmers Union.
He said his farm’s fertilizer prices have increased by 144 to 220 per cent since Dec. 13 and called “All of this just outrageous. We believe that the only way to get to the bottom of these price increases is for an independent body like the House of Commons Agriculture Committee to investigate all of the factors that contribute to fertilizer pricing in Canada”.
Katie Ward, National President of the NFU, has done just that, asking the agriculture committee to launch an investigation “post haste”.
Dean Harder of Manitoba said “sure, we’ve all heard about supply chain problems, and COVID-19 problems, and relatively small increases in the cost of natural gas. But when farmers experience these problems our net income goes down, not up.
“When the fertilizer companies encounter the same problems, their income seems set to double. There is something wrong with this picture, and it may boil down to plain old profiteering.”
Doug Scott of Alberta said “it seems obvious that lack of competition in the fertilizer business allows companies to raise prices to match or overtake commodity prices, regardless of their internal cost structures.
“Fertilizer companies are making windfall profits, while farmers are facing massively increased costs after many did not grow much of a crop in 2021 because of the drought. This unfairness has to change.”
Nutrien is the dominant fertilizer company in Canada. It is the largest potash producer in the world, the sixth-largest nitrogen producer in the world and it bought Agrium, the largest fertilizer retailer in North and South America and Australia, and merged them to form Nutrien in January, 2018.
