Rising agricultural production costs in Jordan are no longer a burden on farmers alone. They are rippling directly through to consumers, the national economy and food security as a whole, agricultural experts told Al Ghad. What is needed now, the experts said, is smart policy that absorbs costs by raising efficiency - not open-ended subsidies that strain the budget without solving the underlying problem. Protecting small farmers from leaving agriculture altogether, they argued, is itself an investment in long-term social and economic stability.
اضافة اعلان
The surge in costs is attributed in part to the Strait of Hormuz crisis, which has had a direct and significant impact on global fertiliser markets. Gulf states export around 46 percent of the world's urea supply and roughly 30 percent of its ammonia, meaning any disruption to navigation through that strategic corridor is felt immediately in supply chains and global prices.
The latest figures and estimates point to sharp fertiliser price increases across categories during 2026, based on global market data. Urea prices have risen by as much as 80 percent since February 2026, surpassing $850 per metric tonne in April 2026. Ammonia prices have climbed between 20 and 50 percent since the start of regional tensions - a steep rise that has alarmed global markets, given that the Middle East supplies around 30 percent of the world's ammonia. Sulphur prices have more than doubled since the start of 2026, with an additional increase of more than 40 percent recorded. Phosphate supplies have been heavily affected, with prices for derivatives such as diammonium phosphate (DAP) rising sharply due to supply shortages in the region. Overall, global mineral fertiliser prices have risen by between 30 and 40 percent, driven by the Strait of Hormuz crisis and regional tensions.
Dr Fadel Al-Zoubi, Secretary-General of the National Alliance to Combat Hunger and Malnutrition and a food security expert, said Jordanian agriculture - like most countries in the region - is under mounting pressure from rising production costs. The problem, he said, is no longer confined to water scarcity, climate variability or market disruption; the cost of inputs has itself become the greatest threat to the sector's sustainability. Farmers now face a difficult economic equation: higher production costs, with selling prices that cannot rise at the same pace.
Al-Zoubi said the causes are multiple and interlinked. Chief among them is the rising price of fertilisers, which Jordan depends on imports to supply in significant quantities - meaning any disruption in global markets or shipping and energy costs hits the local farmer directly. Energy, he added, is embedded in almost every stage of the agricultural process, from pumping water and running machinery to refrigeration, storage and transport.
"In a country suffering from water scarcity, the cost of delivering water to crops becomes a critical factor in production economics," Al-Zoubi said. Rising labour and service costs add a further burden, particularly for small farmers who lack the liquidity to purchase seasonal inputs or absorb a poor harvest.
The consequences extend well beyond farm income. When small farmers exit the production cycle, part of the domestic productive base is lost and dependence on external markets increases - at a time when international supply chains are already exposed to repeated geopolitical and climate shocks. Higher costs also feed through to consumer food prices and weigh on national food security. Large farms can absorb some of the pressure by investing in solar energy or cold storage, Al-Zoubi said, but small farmers remain the weakest link and the most exposed to losses or permanent exit from agriculture.
Al-Zoubi said the solution does not lie in open-ended direct subsidies but in shifting from subsidising inputs to subsidising efficiency. He pointed to the expansion of solar-powered irrigation as a measure that has already proved its economic value in the Jordan Valley compared with conventional energy alternatives. Precision agriculture and soil analysis, he said, help farmers apply the right quantity of fertiliser rather than over-applying it, cutting costs while protecting the environment.
"Agricultural cooperatives and associations can also play a central role in bulk purchasing of fertilisers and inputs, giving small farmers greater bargaining power and lowering unit costs," Al-Zoubi said. He also called for affordable agricultural financing tied to investment in cost-reduction technologies such as modern irrigation and efficient cold storage, and for the expansion of agricultural insurance to help farmers absorb climate and price shocks.
On marketing, Al-Zoubi said that cutting production costs would not be enough if farmers continued to receive only a small share of the final price. Reducing unnecessary intermediary steps between producer and consumer, developing producer markets, contract marketing and cold chains, and cutting post-harvest losses are all needed to increase the farmer's share of the value added.
Dr Nael Al-Daher, a faculty member at the University of Jordan's College of Agriculture and an expert in rural development and food security, said rising agricultural production costs have ceased to be a purely farm-level concern. They are now a matter of agricultural sustainability, food security, rural development and food price stability. A farmer today, he said, faces a production bill spread across seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, labour, energy, water, transport, packaging and marketing - and any simultaneous increase across those elements bears directly on profit margins, above all for small farmers with limited access to financing, storage, bargaining power and direct market access.
Al-Daher said a producer can in principle pass higher costs on to consumers through higher prices, but agricultural reality is more complex. Small farmers, particularly those growing perishable crops, often have no control over the price they receive. When large numbers of producers reach the market at the same time, prices can fall even when production costs are high. The result is a paradox: consumers may pay more for food while farmers do not necessarily earn more.
This problem is especially significant in Jordan, Al-Daher said. The Department of Statistics tracks not only farmgate prices but also input and marketing costs - including fertilisers, pesticides, seeds, seedlings, packaging, loading, transport and market fees. Its data indicate that marketing costs can in some cases account for more than a quarter of the selling price at central markets. Addressing the problem therefore cannot focus on farm-level production costs alone; it must encompass the full chain from farm to market.
Small farmers are the most exposed to these pressures, Al-Daher said. Large farms can buy inputs in bulk, negotiate prices, adopt technology, diversify production and absorb a relatively poor season. For a small farmer, even a modest rise in the cost of fertiliser, energy or labour - coinciding with a fall in the price of produce - can turn a profitable season into a loss. If costs continue to rise without a matching improvement in productivity or farmgate prices, some farmers may reduce their cultivated area, switch crops or gradually leave agriculture altogether.
"At that point the problem moves from farm income to food security and rural development," Al-Daher said. When small producers leave agriculture, the impact is not only a reduction in output. It means the loss of a rural family's income, a decline in local economic activity, and the disappearance of agricultural knowledge and experience built up over years. Protecting small farmers should therefore not be seen merely as social policy, but as part of preserving the national productive base.
Al-Daher said the answer is not to subsidise all inputs without limit, as that approach is likely to be costly and unsustainable. What is needed is a shift from subsidising costs to reducing them: raising efficiency, strengthening collective purchasing of inputs through cooperatives, expanding agricultural extension services, improving the efficiency of water, energy and fertiliser use, encouraging renewable energy and water-saving technologies where viable, providing appropriate financing, expanding contract farming, and improving storage, refrigeration, agro-processing and market linkages for producers.
Equally important, he said, is improving the farmer's bargaining power. The problem is not always simply the cost per kilogram of production but how much of the final value of that kilogram the farmer actually receives by the time it reaches the consumer. "We need to know more precisely: how much does the farmer get from every dinar the consumer pays, and how much goes to transport, packaging, storage, marketing and intermediaries? Answering those questions is essential to building fairer and more efficient agricultural value-chain policies," he said.
If efficiency in production and marketing is not improved, Al-Daher warned, the cost will ultimately be shared by everyone - farmers through shrinking profit margins, consumers through higher food prices, the state through greater demand for subsidies and social protection, and rural communities through fewer jobs and less economic activity. "The real question is not how to keep input prices low forever - that may not be possible in an economy exposed to global markets - but how to make farmers more capable of coping with rising costs without losing their ability to compete and continue. The sustainability of agriculture starts with a simple equation: if production is not viable for the farmer, agriculture will not be sustainable no matter how important it is to food security."
Agricultural researcher and development expert Dr Nabil Bani Hani said that amid mounting pressures on Jordan's agricultural production system from rising energy, water and input costs, the burden is not distributed equally across the supply chain.
Bani Hani proposed the following approximate distribution of the impact: farmers bear the largest share, at around 40 percent. As the frontline, they absorb the direct consequences of water scarcity and higher costs for pumping energy, labour and fertilisers. Farmers are typically unable to pass these sharp increases through to wholesale prices, given competition and supply-and-demand dynamics, which eats into profit margins and threatens their continued participation in production.
The central wholesale market for fruit and vegetables bears around 15 percent of the burden, Bani Hani said. As a network of intermediaries and brokers, the market is affected by falling volumes and slower trade as overall prices rise. Although market commissions are calculated at fixed rates, declining purchasing power and reduced liquidity place clear operational pressure on investors and traders, who also bear the risk of crop spoilage and slow turnover.
Consumers bear around 25 percent of the burden, Bani Hani said, making them the ultimate victims in the food security equation. Retail prices reflect the cumulative increases in production, transport and handling costs, placing additional strain on Jordanian households' purchasing power and on food security and living standards.
Retail greengrocers bear around 10 percent, facing twin pressures from higher transport costs, shop rents and daily spoilage losses on fruit and vegetables. These outlets often find it difficult to pass the full increase on to end consumers for fear of unsold perishable stock, which reduces their daily net margins.
Input supply companies and importers - dealing in seeds, pesticides and fertilisers - bear the remaining 10 percent, Bani Hani said, through credit risk, frozen liquidity and falling sales volumes combined with rising bad-debt risk. When a farmer runs into financial difficulty, liquidity freezes for suppliers even as those suppliers try to pass global price and shipping increases on to the local market.
Note: In one paragraph the article attributes the description of the retail greengrocer burden to Al-Daher rather than Bani Hani. This appears to be an error in the source text; the editor should verify which expert made this observation.
This article was originally written in Arabic for Al Ghad.
