What if China bans phosphate fertilizer exports outright?
A hard Chinese phosphate-export ban starves India and Brazil of DAP ahead of planting — long phosphate names and rising farmer input costs; the Nasdaq/semis/yuan cascade misreads a fertilizer-supply trigger as a tech trade war. Rhymes with China's 2021-22 phosphate export controls that drove DAP to decade highs and forced India to ration. Transmission: India/Brazil pivot to Morocco's OCP and Saudi Ma'aden, lifting global benchmarks. Forward: China's swing role means the ban sets the world price — bullish phosphate through the next two planting cycles.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. China extends a hard ban on phosphate fertilizer exports, starving India and Brazil of DAP ahead of planting. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Food inflation ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.