India’s food security is largely dependent on the Persian Gulf
India's agricultural achievement is one of its great post-Independence success stories. From the brink of famine in the mid-1960s, the country is now among the world's largest producers of wheat, rice, and sugar, with foodgrain output exceeding 330 million tonnes in 2023-24 — more than five times what it was in 1947.
But, a closer examination reveals that India's food security rests on a continuous supply of synthetic fertilisers derived from imported natural gas, phosphate, and potash. The countries that supply these inputs are, overwhelmingly, the same Gulf States that supply India's oil, and the US-Israeli war on Iran has exposed this dependence.
This dependence is not just in India. In a recent essay in the Financial Times, economist Adam Hanieh lays out how thoroughly the Gulf has embedded itself in global agriculture. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest exporter of urea, and the second-largest exporter of ammonia. Roughly half of all global seaborne sulphur — the key input in making phosphate fertilisers — passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
As a large agricultural producer, India is among the most vulnerable. According to the government's response in Parliament, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar together supplied more than three-quarters of India's ammonia imports in 2024. In 2024-25, Oman alone supplied 26 lakh metric tonnes of India's urea imports, Saudi Arabia supplied 19 lakh tonnes of di-ammonium phosphate (DAP), and Russia, which routes much of its supply through Gulf logistics corridors, supplied another 18 lakh tonnes of potash. Potash, which almost every crop requires, is 100% imported.
Overall, the proportion of imports are significant — 18% for urea, 56% for DAP, and 100% for potash. But these figures understate the real exposure. Domestic fertiliser production is largely an assembly operation built on imported inputs. Domestic DAP manufacturers import their phosphoric acid, ammonia, and sulphur. The fertiliser sector is India's single largest consumer of natural gas, accounting for nearly a third of total consumption.
When you include imported raw materials and intermediates alongside finished product imports, the total value of India's fertiliser-related import bill in 2021-22, the last year for which comprehensive data is available, reached $24.3 billion, nearly double the $12.8 billion in finished fertiliser imports alone.
For the farmer in the field, the Gulf dependence translates directly into cost and risk. Growing a tonne of wheat on a typical irrigated acre in Punjab or Haryana costs between ₹14,500 and ₹22,000, of which urea and DAP account for ₹4,500 to ₹6,500, or roughly 25-30% of total input costs. For paddy the proportions are similar: Fertiliser runs ₹4,500 to ₹7,000 out of a total cultivation cost of ₹18,000 to ₹26,000 per acre.
Across all crops, government data shows fertiliser consistently accounting for about 16% of total paid-out costs and that is at the artificially suppressed, government-subsidised price. At market rates, fertiliser costs would comprise roughly half of the costs of farm inputs.
Meanwhile, the cost to taxpayers is enormous. Urea has been sold at ₹242 per 45kg bag since march 2018, frozen by political decree through multiple governments. The actual cost of producing or importing it is several times that. The government covers the gap — for both imported and domestically produced fertiliser — through a subsidy that was budgeted at nearly $23 billion in 2024-25, equivalent to a third of what the country spends on national defense. When global prices spike, as they did after Ukraine in 2022 and as they are again now, that bill grows automatically, with no ceiling. The fertiliser subsidy, while seeming to be a welfare payment to farmers, is really an invisible subsidy to the Gulf States.
This dependency is not sustainable either from a strategic or an environmental standpoint. There are credible routes out of this. Andhra Pradesh's Zero Budget Natural Farming programme, covering more than 8 million hectares, uses local microbial cultures, crop rotation, and composting in place of synthetic inputs. A large evaluation published in 2025 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found it more than doubled farmer profits while holding yields steady, with input cost savings of 20-50%.
Sikkim went fully organic a decade ago and recorded a 12% productivity gain over five years. For farms not ready for full transition, integrated nutrient management blending modest synthetic fertiliser with compost, green manure, and biofertilisers like Rhizobium and Azospirillum can reduce chemical input requirements by 25-40% without yield loss. These are not pilot projects, but at-scale exemplars in India.
The more transformative option further out is green ammonia which is produced from solar energy. India's solar capacity is already among the largest in the world. Severing the link between food production and Gulf hydrocarbons is, in principle, achievable within a generation, while also bringing India much closer to its greenhouse gas reduction commitments.
To be fair, a rapid wholesale switch away from synthetic fertilisers would risk crop production in ways no government can afford to ignore. Transition must be phased and targeted, starting in rainfed regions where synthetic fertilisers already perform poorly and the subsidy bill buys the least benefit.
Sri Lanka offers a useful lesson on what happens when transition is mismanaged. In 2021, Sri Lanka's government banned chemical fertilisers overnight, with no phased plan or alternative inputs in place. Within months, rice yields fell by nearly 40%, vegetable prices doubled, and food shortages spread across the country. The ban was reversed within six months, but not before contributing to an economic collapse that brought down the government. The lesson however is not that transition is impossible, but that it must be planned, sequenced, and supported. Farmers will have to be compensated for yield losses during the transition, but this is entirely affordable given the yield gains post transition.
The Green Revolution was India's first independence from famines and food shortages. However, it traded one dependency — on rain and fortune — for another, on imported hydrocarbons and Gulf goodwill. Our second Green Revolution will have to focus on independence from the unpredictable and uncontrollable politics of West Asia, while also tackling climate change and preserving foreign currency for more strategic inputs. Indian farmers deserve nothing less.
Key Insights
- This topic is currently trending
- Experts are closely monitoring developments
- It may impact future decisions
