Farm Economics

India's fertiliser sector runs on Gulf-region gas and imported potash and phosphate — so when the 2026 West-Asia conflict shut down Strait of Hormuz shipping, urea prices jumped over 75% in a year, even as India entered the season with unusually large stockpiles cushioning the immediate blow.

A survey of 40 farmers in Odisha's hilly Gajapati district finds every single one sells exclusively via informal roadside stalls, with poor transport as the dominant barrier — and not one has ever received government or institutional marketing support.

Using two decades of Indian inflation data, this study finds a durable long-run link between agricultural production and both consumer and wholesale price inflation — spiking sharply during the 2008 financial crisis and again in 2021, before both measures corrected by 2023.