IFASTAT - Global Fertilizer and Raw Materials Statistics

IFASTAT is the International Fertilizer Association's statistical database of global fertilizer capacity, production, trade and consumption - the fertilizer industry's own statistical authority, compiled by IFA's Market Intelligence service and cited by the FAO, the USDA and academic researchers. Relaunched in April 2026, it consolidates six decades of nutrient statistics behind dynamic dashboards, a reports library and a query layer whose product-level detail reaches back to 1973.

The numbers carry weight because of how they are built. Consumption comes from an annual IFA survey of contacts in 45-50 countries representing roughly 85-90% of global fertilizer use, supplemented by national statistics and apparent-consumption arithmetic (production + imports - exports - technical/industrial use). Around that core sit regional capacity series for ammonia, urea, processed phosphates, potash and phosphate rock, a 2013-2024 production/imports/exports/apparent-consumption file for ammonium nitrate and calcium ammonium nitrate, and IFA's current short-term and medium-term (2026-2030) fertilizer outlooks.

Get a sample of this dataset and Datadory returns rows shaped exactly like the dictionary below, cut for the countries and nutrients you name.

Rows exactly as they arrive - four observations from the nutrient-totals consumption file:

Nutrient    Region       Country       ISO3  Year  Grain  Unit              Indicator                Value
----------  -----------  ------------  ----  ----  -----  ----------------  -----------------------  ------
Nitrogen    West Asia    Afghanistan   AFG   1964  A      '000 tonnes N     Fertilizer consumption   0.10
Phosphorus  West Asia    Afghanistan   AFG   1964  A      '000 tonnes P2O5  Fertilizer consumption   0.10
Potassium   Africa       Zimbabwe      ZWE   2024  A      '000 tonnes K2O   Fertilizer consumption   44.78
Nitrogen    Africa       Zimbabwe      ZWE   2024  A      '000 tonnes N     Fertilizer consumption   90.11

Six decades in four lines. Afghanistan's 1964 entries record essentially no measured fertilizer use - tenths of a thousand tonne across both N and P2O5 - while Zimbabwe's 2024 nitrogen figure of 90.11 thousand tonnes describes a national market that barely existed when the series began. Every row is one country x nutrient x year observation, unit-tagged so tonnes of N never blur into tonnes of K2O, which is what lets all 19,871 headline rows join into a single demand panel without cleaning gymnastics.

Nine documented fields carry the headline consumption file. Each definition below is verified against the dataset's own specification, and the example column shows where the field sits in real records.

Additional fields on request: the regional capacity columns for ammonia, urea, processed phosphates, potash and phosphate rock; the production, import, export and apparent-consumption columns from the ammonium nitrate / calcium ammonium nitrate file; and product-level breakdowns beneath the nutrient totals. Deeper columns are confirmed against live records when we prepare your sample - which is also where column-level naming gets locked down for your pipeline.

Three chips summarize the footprint:

• Geography: global, at 133 countries grouped into 10 IFA regions - West Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe & Central Asia, North America, Latin America, Africa, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. The consumption file breaks to country level; the capacity and production/trade series publish as regional totals.
• Time frame: consumption spans 1961-2024, sixty-four consecutive years, with product-level consumption from 1973. Supply-side series - capacity, production and trade - start in 2000, the ammonium nitrate/CAN file covers 2013-2024, and the outlook reports reach forward through 2030.
• Granularity: annual rows keyed on country x nutrient x year. Reference periods mix calendar years with fertilizer-campaign years (July-June in some countries), and the granularity code flags which applies per row.

Set against the wider Datadory catalog - where the average quality score across all 1,744 datasets is 7.81 - this slice scores 8/10, carried by its verified nine-field dictionary and the sheer length of the consumption record.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; the rows arrive identical either way - cleaned, typed and documented against the field dictionary above. The wide regional capacity workbooks reshape into tidy long form on arrival, the consumption file joins to your crop, price or parcels panels on country, nutrient and year, and outlook-report figures land as structured rows instead of slide decks. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

Ranked by how directly the collection answers their day job:

1. Market researchers & consultants. Nutrient demand by country and region since 1961 is the baseline under most crop-input market sizings, backed by a survey covering roughly 85-90% of global fertilizer use. Fertilizers & agricultural chemicals for market researchers
2. Investors & quant researchers. Regional capacity additions lead price cycles: new ammonia and urea capacity shows up in these series before it shows up in producer margins. Fertilizers & agricultural chemicals for investors and quants
3. Data scientists & ML engineers. A 64-year country x nutrient x year panel with consistent unit tagging is rare training material for demand-forecasting models, and 19,871 headline rows join cleanly against crop and price series. Fertilizers & agricultural chemicals for data scientists
4. Journalists & academics. The FAO and USDA cite these figures; when a story or paper needs an authoritative consumption number, this is the same well they draw from. Fertilizers & agricultural chemicals for journalists and academics
5. Competitive intelligence, sales and developer teams. Where producing capacity concentrates, which regions add phosphate versus potash, and how consumption tracks population all make concrete qualification and integration material.

For contrast within the same industry: FAOSTAT Fertilizers by Nutrient mirrors the country-level consumption story from a UN statistical office, and Our World in Data's fertilizers series repackages it for exploration - neither carries the association's own capacity and production-trade files.

Four things worth knowing upfront. First, the reference-period split: calendar-year reporters sit beside July-June campaign-year reporters, and the granularity flag is the only thing keeping them comparable - normalize before quoting growth rates. Second, consumption here means plant-nutrition use only; animal feed and technical or industrial applications are excluded by definition, so industrial-demand studies need a different lens. Third, the supply-side files publish as regional totals - ammonia, urea, processed phosphate, potash and phosphate rock capacity arrive per region, not per plant or per country - so country-level capacity questions ride on the sample route rather than the headline series. Fourth, apparent-consumption years inherit every distortion in the trade accounts behind them. None of this touches the core consumption ledger, which rests on a survey covering roughly 85-90% of global fertilizer use.

Notes and adjacent datasets that pair well with this page:

• FAOSTAT Fertilizers by Nutrient - the UN's country-level mirror of the same consumption concept; a natural second opinion.
• Our World in Data - Fertilizers - the explorable repackaging, handy for charting and sanity checks.
• The Fertilizer Institute - Market Intelligence Statistics - the North American industry counterpart for US-centric supply questions.
• IndexMundi fertilizer commodity prices - monthly price context to lay alongside the volume record.
• DEFRA vs IFASTAT comparison - UK farm-practice survey detail against the global statistical ledger.
• Best fertilizers & agricultural chemicals datasets - the ranked shortlist across every cataloged source in the industry.
• Fertilizers & agricultural chemicals data hub - every dataset, use case and persona page for the industry in one place.