With the development of agricultural economy, China’s chemical fertilizer market is gradually expanding. The apparent consumption of chemical fertilizer is going up annually, especially from 2003 to 2005; it began to slow down in 2006 and reached 57.47 million tons in 2007, up by 1.4% over the same period of 2006.

Chart Apparent consumption of China’s chemical fertilizer industry, 2003-2007


Increasing demand for chemical fertilizer in China is mainly due to the following reasons: 1. agriculture production heavily relies on chemical fertilizer, so its development will stimulate large demand for chemical fertilizer. 2. Adjustment of agricultural structure has influence on volume and structure of demand for chemical fertilizer. Currently, China’s agricultural structure adjustment aims at reducing planting area for grain crop and increasing this for cash crop (like vegetables, fruit trees), cash crops’ demand for chemical fertilizer is 1.2-2.0 times that of ordinary grain crops, so the adjustment will increase per unit area fertilizing amount and demand volume, meanwhile it will increase the demand for phosphatic fertilizer, potash fertilizer, compound fertilizer and special fertilizer.

Nitrogenous fertilizer dominates China’s chemical fertilizer industry with its proportion of total assets around 60%. According to the development trend, nitrogenous fertilizer has a declining proportion in asset, revenue and profit of chemical fertilizer industry, whereas compound fertilizer and potassic fertilizer show a rising trend, other sub-sectors keep steady proportion.

Many sets of large-sized chemical fertilizer equipment has been installed in recent years, which have greatly raised China’s chemical fertilizer production, the output in 2007 reached 57 million tons. Meanwhile, increasing demand for chemical fertilizer stimulate the supply in return.

Production of carbamide and phosphatic fertilizer has kept a rapid growth in China since 2007, and great changes have taken place in import and export, more exports and steady imports. However, according to the situation of supply and demand, there existed balance between import and export. At the same time, chemical fertilizer price of international market kept soaring. China’s export volume of chemical fertilizer reached 13.81 million tons in 2007, up by 153.4% over the previous year, and the import volume was 11.65 million tons, up by 4.1%.

With the marketization of chemical fertilizer, changes in import and export policies are as follows: 1. Shift from focusing on import to keeping balance(namely administration of both import and export); 2. Shift from non-tariff measures to tariff measures; 3. Control over import and export to keep appropriate volume.