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Global fertilizer and commodity benchmark prices, monthly since 1960: urea, DAP, MOP, TSP

The global monthly commodity sheet in nominal dollars from 1960, all 71 commodities and the indices. The fertilizer slice is the import-cost direction behind every local move.

Catalogue entry: Global commodity benchmarks. Monthly world commodity benchmark prices in nominal US dollars, back to 1960. Global by nature, deliberately kept out of the county-level series.

Questions this data answers

  • Is the world price of urea and DAP moving before it reaches a Kenyan shelf, and by how much this month?
  • How much of a Kenyan DAP price rise is the world market and how much is added between port and shelf?
  • When did urea last spike above 800 dollars a tonne, and how long did the shelf take to follow it down?
  • Does DAP follow phosphate rock over 10 years closely enough to hedge one with the other?
On this page
  1. Questions this data answers
  2. What the global benchmark prices holds
  3. Why it stands apart
  4. 10 years in the chart
  5. At the snapshot
  6. Sample data
  7. Fields
  8. Filters
  9. The same call, three ways
  10. Related datasets

What the global benchmark prices holds

The global monthly commodity sheet in nominal dollars, all 71 commodities and their indices, running from January 1960: energy, metals, food, beverages and fertilizer, 1 point per commodity per month throughout. The fertilizer slice specifically is DAP, urea, potassium chloride, TSP, phosphate rock and the fertilizers index, all priced in dollars per tonne.

Why it stands apart

A global price per tonne and a county price per kilogram are simply different things, which is exactly why the 2 live in separate datasets rather than risk an accidental join between them. The landed-cost analysis makes that join deliberately, and in order: benchmark first, then what importers paid, then retail last.

10 years in the chart

Urea ran from 265 dollars per tonne in January 2021 up to 925 in April 2022 and back down to 314 by March 2023; DAP moved from 421 up to 954 and back to 455 over the same stretch. 2026 brought a second urea spike, 415 in January climbing to 857 in April and settling at 390 by August, while DAP instead climbed steadily to 794 without the same whiplash. Reading a Kenyan retail series against this one separates what’s the world moving from what’s the shelf moving.

At the snapshot

August 2026: DAP 793.5, urea 390.0, potassium chloride 386.9 dollars per tonne. The benchmark analysis returns this exact slice with its 12-month change attached; the landed-cost analysis treats it as the first link in its chain.

Sample data

10 years of urea and DAP

121 months from August 2016. The 2021 to 2022 run took urea from 265 to 925 and DAP from 421 to 954 dollars per tonne; the platform holds the full sheet back to 1960, so the same chart can be drawn for any window.

Last twelve months

MonthDAPUreaPotassium chloride
2026-09800.6407.5367.5
2026-08793.5390386.9
2026-07781.3400396.5
2026-06783.8453.1402.5
2026-05769.5770.5405
2026-04725.3856.9401.3
2026-03658.3725.6380.6
2026-02626.5472372.5
2026-01619.2415.4366
2025-12627.5392.5358.3
2025-11708.3409.3353.8
2025-10754394.4352

USD per metric tonne, nominal. One point per commodity per month.

Dataset idmarket.worldbank
Cadencemonthly
EndpointGET /market/benchmarks
Key scopemarket:read
Declared fields1
History1960-01 to today
Coverageglobal
StatusServed over the API

Global reference data — the same rows for every caller.

Source: World Bank Commodity Price Data (CC BY 4.0).

Fields

FieldUnitNote
priceUSD/mt or index

Filters

sourcescopecommodityunitkind

The same call, three ways

curl -G https://api.nuasense.com/api/nuasense/v1/market/benchmarks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer nua_live_…" \
  -d start=-30d -d commodity=urea,dap,potassium_chloride

Through the MCP connector the same read is the platform_dataset tool with dataset=market.worldbank. Through a scheduled export it is one job with the same filters, delivered as a file. Every dataset takes the same arguments: start and end, every with agg, fields, limit up to 5,000, order, and the tags it declares.