In early April, the company sitting on the world’s largest phosphate reserves brought forward by six months a maintenance programme scheduled for Q4, pulling 30% of fertilizer output offline as the Hormuz crisis began to bite. Two months on, with Morocco’s OCP returning to full capacity, the rescheduling looks anything but coincidental.
Iran’s blockade has removed nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer supply from international markets. Sulphur is a critical phosphate input and now trades at roughly six times its pre-crisis level, and the World Bank projects fertilizer prices will rise by more than 30% this year.
Around half of seaborne sulphur and a third of ammonia traditionally transit Hormuz, and Saudi Ma’aden and Qatari producers are running at reduced capacity. Yet OCP — which controls about 69% of the world’s known phosphate reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — is emerging stronger.
A fifteen-year head start
What looks like fortune is the result of strategy. In 2010, King Mohammed VI made African food security a pillar of Moroccan diplomacy — more than a decade before Western institutions caught up. The years that followed saw OCP methodically decouple its operations from the external constraints that still weigh on every other phosphate producer.
In a water-stressed country, the Group now desalinates 320 million cubic metres of seawater a year, feeding its largest mine and a quarter of Casablanca South’s drinking supply through a 203-kilometre pipeline. Its Khouribga site, the world’s largest phosphate mine, has run entirely on renewables since December 2025. Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, an in-house research arm now a decade old, produces fertilizers with cadmium levels three times below EU limits. And in April, OCP raised $1.5 billion through Africa’s first hybrid bond, oversubscribed 4.6 times across 176 investors in 23 countries.
The Group used the maintenance window to accelerate its pivot toward triple superphosphate (TSP), a product less sulphur-intensive and exempted from the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. TSP will account for more than half of 2026 output, up from 30% last year.
A geopolitical asset for Africa
For a continent that buys 42% of its phosphate fertilizers from Morocco and must feed 2.5 billion people by 2050, OCP’s stability is no longer commercial, it is strategic. Where others see Africa as a market, Rabat spent fifteen years building a south-south industrial partnership that the World Bank now identifies as central to global food security. Yet, the crisis will end. But the market’s reassessment of where phosphate dependability really lives — quietly forged over fifteen years — has only just begun.
