By Joshua Mayfield, Growth Minerals Analyst for Hallgarten+Co
On the 25th of September an important announcement by Canpotex came out during a tumultuous time in President Trump’s tariff war on Canada: A $500-million investment will be carried out over the next two years to upgrade the export terminal in Vancouver, Canada.
This investment will increase potash shipments from the mines in Saskatchewan Province. Canpotex claims that potash shipments will be boosted annually to 11 million tons after the terminal upgrades are completed. On this modernization strategy, we had a discussion with The Globe & Mail about what this will mean for the global potash market and specifically the Latin American market for potash.
A lot of the focus on future potash exports from BHP’s Jansen mine is on the Brazilian market, and K+S has a notable presence in the Brazilian potash market as well. The questions revolving around the future potash demand for Brazil are twofold: hedging against geopolitical risk and securing the world’s food supply. Canpotex ensures that it will be the leading force in both scenarios for Brazil and the rest of the world. As the saying has been for decades, “Saskatchewan is helping feed the world, one potash shipment at a time.”
However, the reason that Canpotex isn’t the only tour de force in the global potash market is because there are large-scale mines in the Urals of Belarus and Russia. They are inevitably targeting a dominance on potash pricing and trading in the East of Suez markets, where there is also a growing demand for potash fertilizers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and more to come in the future with the emergence of national food security politics throughout the rice growing areas of the world. China, for example, surpassed 11 million tons of potash imports in the first half of 2026.
Another important point is about an additional ownership stake in the Neptune terminal. This export terminal is not only for potash shipments, since Elk Valley Resources, a former subsidiary of global mining giant Teck Resources, also uses the terminal to export steel-making coal. Elk Valley Resources doesn’t belong to Teck anymore because it was sold to Glencore for US$7.3 billion back in 2024. This means that Canpotex must co-manage the Neptune terminal with a completely different company and shareholder under Glencore.
Read more about the global potash market and agriculture news in this edition of the Growth Minerals Review
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