The Superpower Canadians Don't Know They Have

There is a rock mined in Saskatchewan that helps feed a meaningful slice of humanity, and almost no one in Canada could tell you its name. It is potash — potassium in a form crops can use — and Canada sits on roughly 30 to 35 percent of the world’s production. Add to that a top-three position in global grain exports and a near-monopoly on some of the pulses that keep South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in protein, and you arrive at an odd fact: Canada is one of the most consequential actors in global food security, and it is a role most Canadians have never thought about.

For a long time none of that felt strategic. Food was a commodity business, subject to weather and price, not geopolitics. Then the choke points started mattering again.

The company at the center

The clearest way to see Canada’s leverage is through Nutrien, the Saskatchewan-based giant that is the world’s largest provider of crop nutrients — potash, nitrogen, phosphate. It controls something like a fifth of global potash capacity on its own. In 2025 it earned US$2.3 billion, and its 2026 guidance points to continued strength from tight supply. Nutrien is also, unusually, its own distributor: a retail network of thousands of farm-service stores across North America and beyond makes it as much a last-mile crop-inputs business as a bulk commodity producer, which gives it a hand on price that pure miners lack.

The reason a fertilizer company became strategically interesting has a date on it: 2022. Russia and Belarus, which together supplied around 40 percent of the world’s potash, ran into export restrictions after the invasion of Ukraine. Overnight, Saskatchewan’s mines went from being one large source among several to something closer to indispensable. The same has happened in phosphate, where Chinese export restrictions have tightened supply of the products Nutrien competes in — pushing more of the world’s demand toward the stable, sanction-proof North American producer.

Fertilizer as geopolitics

Zoom out from the company and the pattern is a global fertilizer market worth well over US$200 billion, buffeted by supply shocks it did not used to have. Gulf disruptions, Chinese export controls and Middle East instability have combined to make crop nutrition a security question rather than an agronomic one. The chokepoint that makes the point most vividly is the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large share of globally traded ammonia, phosphates and sulfur moves — the World Economic Forum noted in 2026 that roughly a third of global urea trade is effectively trapped behind it when tensions spike.

Canada’s advantage in this picture is almost boringly geographic: low-cost potash, a stable political system, and maritime access that does not run through the Middle East. When the world’s fertilizer trade is hostage to a strait most farmers have never heard of, a supplier that sits outside the danger zone is worth a premium. Canada is that supplier.

Grain, pulses and a lentil most Canadians ignore

The story is not only minerals. Canada is the world’s largest exporter of lentils — a protein staple across South Asia and East Africa — and a top-three exporter of wheat and canola. This is where food security and diplomacy braid together most tightly. India, the relationship that ruptured and is now being rebuilt, is a major buyer of Canadian pulses and fertilizers; the trade survived the diplomatic freeze because the underlying need did not care about the politics. The canola dispute with China — tariffs imposed in 2019, partially resolved under Carney in early 2026 — is the same story in reverse: a food export used as a lever in a fight that had nothing to do with food.

The threat to the advantage

There is one force that could erode all of this, and it is not a rival exporter. It is the weather. Prairie droughts and lengthening wildfire seasons are already pressing on Canadian grain yields, and the same warming that is opening the Arctic is making the growing season on the plains less predictable. The IEA projects demand for key crop nutrients rising for years as the global population grows — which means the pressure on Canada’s footprint will increase exactly as the climate makes it harder to supply.

That is the quiet tension in Canada’s food-security power. The demand is structural and rising; the supply depends on a climate that is turning against the very regions that produce it. Canada holds an enormous card in a game most of its citizens don’t know it is playing.

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