The potash business is an obscure and opaque one. Just as there is an oil cartel, OPEC, there is also a potash cartel, with producers aiming, a little like the salt makers of Victorian Cheshire, to control production and prices to keep themselves in the black. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, one consequence was a sudden global shortage of fertiliser, since Russia and its ally Belarus provided roughly a quarter of the world’s potash. There, as here, the sylvite is found among the salt of buried seas: the Pripyat basin in Belarus and the Solikamsk basin in Russia.
