MOROCCO · BUSINESS

Moroccan phosphate fertilizer has entered the United States for the first time in roughly five years, after a cargo of about 54,000 tonnes docked at the Port of New Orleans. It sailed through a temporary emergency window, not a repealed tariff.

The Port of New Orleans, where OCP’s first American cargo in five years came alongside. (Photo: MeRyan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

How Moroccan phosphate got back into a closed market

The mechanism matters more than the cargo. On 29 June the US president signed Proclamation 11038 under section 318(a) of the Tariff Act of 1930, a rarely used emergency provision that allows duty-free importation of specified goods.

Commerce’s implementing notice took effect on 8 July, letting importers apply for duty-free entry shipment by shipment.

This is not a repeal. The countervailing duty order on Moroccan phosphate fertilizer, in force since April 2021, is untouched.

What changed is that individual cargoes can now be waved past it for a limited period, up to eight months or until the emergency is declared over. Approved shipments have 60 days to arrive.

The trigger, on trade-press reporting, was supply rather than diplomacy. Mosaic, the American producer whose 2020 petition brought the duties in the first place, has been curtailing output in Florida, Louisiana and Brazil because of a sulphur supply squeeze that Mosaic’s chief executive attributed to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a blockade in Kazakhstan.

A five-year absence, and what it cost

The duties arrived in April 2021 with an original rate for OCP of 19.97 percent, high enough to price Moroccan product out of the American market almost entirely.

The rate then moved. After litigation at the Court of International Trade, Commerce published amended results on 12 January 2026 setting OCP’s rate for the 2020–21 review period at 2.11 percent.

American farm groups have put a number on the intervening years. A Texas A&M study commissioned by Representative Pat Fallon estimated the duties added about US$6.9 billion to US phosphorus fertilizer costs from the 2021 through the 2025 growing seasons, US$3 billion of it in corn alone.

That is the political economy behind a single vessel. A trade remedy designed to protect one domestic producer became, over five years, an input cost carried by the people buying fertilizer.

The order is not gone, and it may come back higher

Anyone reading this as the end of the dispute should look at the calendar. On 24 July 2026, three weeks after the emergency window opened, Commerce published preliminary results of its statutory sunset review.

Its preliminary finding was that revoking the order would be likely to lead to the continuation or recurrence of a countervailable subsidy, at a rate it put at 20.04 percent for OCP and all others. That is the rate Commerce estimates would prevail if the order went away, not a new duty. It is marginally higher than the original 2021 rate. The International Trade Commission’s own five-year injury review, which it decided in June to conduct in full, has not reported.

So two arms of the same government are, for now, pointing in opposite directions. One has opened a temporary door; the other is preparing to keep the wall standing behind it.

For a buyer, that argues for treating the window as a supply opportunity with an expiry date rather than a structural change in the market.

What Morocco actually controls

The reason any of this is globally significant is concentration. Morocco holds about 50 billion tonnes of phosphate rock reserves, roughly 68 percent of the world total, on the latest US Geological Survey figures.

That is reserves, meaning economically extractable at current prices and technology, rather than the larger and vaguer category of resources. The distinction is often blurred in the trade press.

One caveat belongs in any honest account. The conventional statistics for Morocco include the Bou Craa deposits in Western Sahara, a non-self-governing territory whose status is contested.

OCP itself is a state instrument as much as a company, 94.12 percent owned by the Moroccan government. Its 2025 revenue rose 17.5 percent to about US$11.4 billion, though net profit fell 13 percent on a higher tax charge.

Why one cargo matters beyond one cargo

Phosphate is one of the few inputs in modern agriculture with no substitute. There is no synthetic route to it and no recycling stream at scale, which is why supply concentration in a single country reads as a strategic question rather than a commercial one.

The current squeeze makes the point. China began restricting phosphate fertilizer exports in March 2026 and added licensing requirements from June, removing a major swing supplier from the market.

US net import reliance for phosphorus has climbed from 1.7 percent in 2000 to 13.3 percent in 2024, on figures compiled from USGS data by the University of Illinois. A country that was close to self-sufficient is now a buyer.

For readers in Latin America the parallel is direct rather than academic. Brazil imports the large majority of its fertilizer, and the same concentration that put an American emergency proclamation in the Federal Register is the one that sits behind every soy harvest in Mato Grosso.

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