European farmers are expecting higher input costs for crops planted later this year as the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) begins for imported fertilizers arriving from January 2026.
Fertilizers could start to take a larger share of farmers' production costs if EU fertilizer importers — typically trading firms and large co-operatives — pass on new levies under the CBAM to end-users. The EU has its own nitrate production sector, which is already subject to the emissions trading system (ETS), but also relies heavily on imports for ammonia — a key raw material — and urea and other key fertilizers. EU importers have to buy carbon certificates to cover the carbon footprint of fertilizers produced abroad with the inclusion of fertilizers in the CBAM.
The average French farmer planting non-durum wheat to harvest in 2026 spent close to 14pc of their budget (including remuneration) in euros per hectare (€/ha) on fertilizers, Argus estimates — around one percentage point above the share of fertilizers in input costs for the 2025 non-durum wheat crop. The cost of fertilizers for France's wheat crop that year came to just under €29/t, or 14.5pc of the price at which a French farmer would need to sell to break even, Argus estimates, after remuneration and EU aids, based on a national average yield of 7.44 t/ha in 2025. The share can be slightly lower for corn and barley, compared with wheat and rapeseed.
EU farmers could cut back back on fertilizers, potentially making it harder to achieve the typical standard of crop. Prices for French feed wheat and barley harvested in 2025 have so far traded close to or even above the price of milling wheat for long periods of the current July-June marketing year, which calls into question the value of farmers applying nitrogen fertilizer — used to boost yield but also protein content — to the wheat crop, if wheat's protein content is unable to generate a premium over feed grains at the point of sale.
Higher fertilizer costs could also put a greater general strain on EU farmers' finances and make it harder to mitigate the impact of crop failure or poor yields, potentially making EU grains increasingly uncompetitive in the global market and exacerbating slow farmer selling in recent months at prices that are already below production costs. In Romania and Bulgaria, slow farmer selling has shored up prices since July, keeping export sales slow for much of the marketing year to date. And in France, a combination of factors means that Argus expects the country to end the 2025-26 marketing year with its highest wheat stocks in two decades, a situation that could follow through into 2026-27.
Not just price, but timing and planning
Europe's farming sector has objected to the CBAM because of uncertainty around costs.
CBAM costs for imported fertilizers to the EU will be calculated by subtracting free allowances from actual emissions, or default values if no actual data are available. Free allowances will fall in 2026-34, in line with the free-allowance phase-out for European producers under the EU ETS.
There are two main ways of calculating free allowances — one where actual emissions are known, and one where default values are used as the basis of calculating CBAM costs. At least in the short term, fertilizer importers expect to rely on default values published by the EU, because the methodology for calculating free allowances when actual emissions data are available requires full-year input data of raw materials, as well as total outputs of all fertilizers of a specific process and unit.
The EU published provisional documents for the methodology used for calculating CBAM charges and default values around a fortnight before the charges became effective from 1 January 2026.
The EU has partially responded to concerns about fertilizer affordability, and by extension food security, with the CBAM levy for fertilizers some way below the level that market participants had been expecting until recently. Since news broke on 10 December, the European Commission has confirmed that importers using default values as opposed to plant-specific data will have just a 1pc mark-up on the value used to calculate the amount of CO2 chargeable in euros per tonne under the levy. Importers had previously expected a 30pc mark-up, as is the case for other sectors included under the CBAM.
But another variable in the CBAM charges is the daily ETS price and its average for the quarter in which goods are imported. The ETS price could rise as free allowances are phased out progressively until 2034 and demand for CBAM certificates grows. In the past quarter, the ETS prompt price rose steadily from €76/t on 1 October to €85/t on 31 December, Argus data show.
