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President Donald Trump said on Monday he is working on a “massive deal” to purchase potash from Belarus at prices that are “substantially less” than what the United States currently pays to Canada for the fertilizer, a move that sent Canadian fertilizer stocks plummeting and immediately reshuffled the geopolitical landscape for one of agriculture’s key inputs.
“…..The United States is working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus. Pricing will be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers.”
This comes as Prime Minister Mark Carney is attempting to go deeper into a relationship with the European Union in trade talks, something which President Trump has called a potential “hostile act” that could bring a retaliatory measure from the U.S.
In Saskatchewan, about 85% of all potash exported to the US is mined there. Thus the near-monopoly already being threatened by the Canadians as leverage for other things has been removed by Trump.
The move to potash from Belarus comes as part of a broader shift in diplomacy that has been occurring for months. In December 2025, Washington lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash after dictator Alexander Lukashenko released 123 political prisoners from around the country. It was all set up by special envoy to Lukashenko John Coale. In a separate development, last week Lukashenko released 25 more people from his prisons including several well known journalists and lawyers and one prominent protest leader. In return for their release, the US would lift sanctions on two more Belarusian companies.
“Improved relations between the U.S. and Belarus and more people are going to be released. We’re not finished yet,” Coale wrote on the social media platform X.
This is the way Trump does foreign policy — he is a transactional guy. He wants the prisoners home. He wants to cut the price of the fertilizer to the American farmer. And he wants to break a foreign chokehold on a critical portion of our supply chain. And, by the way, that is going to be very bad for the Canadians.
The new agreement will require Belarus to set up new infrastructure to deliver the potash. So far, all of Belarus’s 2026 production is already contracted to China, Lukashenko said Monday. So this will have to be negotiated on a large scale, with a long phase-in period.
But there’s a far more important signal in the Trump announcement: for years, US foreign policy has been dictated by the donor-class-led foreign policy establishment which viewed sanctions as a one-way ratchet — easy to impose but impossible to lift. By repealing the sanctions here, Trump is treating the tool of sanctions as he should — as a lever for human rights, for agricultural commodity price reductions for American farmers, and for new diplomatic openings that the establishment considered to be beyond the pale.
Nutrien Ltd., the largest potash producer in Canada, saw shares plummet on the news. Because, quite frankly, American farmers have been bearing the brunt of high fertilizer prices for far too long. They will welcome the chance to shop around for the best price.
The Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has long warned that if Canada tried to use potash as a retaliatory weapon against the U.S. he would expect that within a long time Canada would lose a large customer. In fact that has now become reality — not because of anything that Canada did, but because the U.S. has simply decided to go elsewhere.
However, there is some counter-signaling news on the web...
CDM will monitor this situation.
