A severe shortage of chemical fertiliser has disrupted this year’s paddy transplanting season across Nepal’s southern plains, with farmers unable to find urea and diammonium phosphate (DAP) through local cooperatives increasingly crossing into India in search of supplies, a move that has led to at least one reported detention.
Two farmers were reportedly held by Indian security forces after buying a small quantity of fertiliser in a border market and attempting to bring it back into Nepal, on suspicion of smuggling. They remain in custody pending a court hearing.
Fertiliser is central to Nepali agriculture. Urea and DAP are applied at two critical points, once at transplanting and again roughly three weeks later, and the timing matters as much as the quantity: nutrients absorbed late in the plant’s growth cycle cannot fully compensate for a missed early application. For the millions of subsistence and smallholder households that depend on rice as their primary crop and food source, a poor application window can mean a meaningfully smaller harvest for the entire year, with direct consequences for household food security and income, not just farm output on paper.
This year’s shortage, while part of a recurring seasonal pattern, appears unusually acute. Farmers across several districts report cooperative depots running out of DAP entirely, forcing many to transplant without it or delay planting past the optimal window. Cross-border purchases, long treated as an informal safety valve when domestic supply falls short, have become considerably harder this season as security checks on the Indian side have tightened and prices in Indian markets have roughly doubled.
Authorities attribute the shortfall to a mix of delayed imports, partly linked to disruption in global supply chains from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and a domestic distribution bottleneck. A significant volume of fertiliser reportedly sits unclaimed in provincial warehouses because cooperatives, allocated quotas too small to meaningfully cover their farmer base, have been reluctant to collect and distribute it in ways that avoid disputes among farmers.
According to the agriculture ministry, more than half of the fertiliser Nepal typically distributes in a year had been supplied by late June, against national annual demand estimated at 1.1 to 1.2 million metric tonnes. Further shipments are expected to arrive from mid-July, though officials acknowledge this will do little to help farmers who needed fertiliser at the start of the transplanting season.