Trump says he is working on a massive potash deal. Belarus says its volumes are all contracted.

On Monday the president of the United States announced on Truth Social that he is working on a “massive deal” to buy potash from Belarus. “The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers,” he wrote.¹

Also on Monday, Alexander Lukashenka took a report from the chairman of his State Customs Committee and said the opposite. He claimed it is impossible to supply large volumes, because all fertilizers for this year have already been contracted, and that even if Belarus wanted to enter other Western markets there are supposedly no free volumes of product.² CTV News puts the same line more bluntly: according to Belarusian media reports on Monday, Lukashenka said that even if there was a desire to enter Western markets, there is nothing left to supply.¹

One of these describes a deal being worked on; the other is the named supplier explaining that the shelf is full up. They were issued the same day, about the same commodity, by the president of the prospective buyer and by the leader of the country named as the source.

Suppose the shelf were not empty. There are two further problems, and neither of them is a matter of price.

Potash from Belarus remains under EU sanctions, and the landlocked country has been barred from exporting through the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda since February 2022 — that is CTV’s account, attributed to Reuters.¹ Landlocked is the operative word. Nasha Niva’s own assessment is that the main obstacle to large supplies of Belarusian potash to the United States is still the refusal of EU countries, despite American pressure, to allow transit through the Baltic ports, and it suggests this was the central issue when the US president’s special representative John Koole went to Lithuania and Latvia after visiting Minsk.²

So the announced bargain runs into three things: volumes its owner says are not free, a sanctions regime the seller’s product is under, and a Baltic port barred to that seller since February 2022.¹² The part CTV reproduces of what was posted is a price comparison with Canada.¹ The price is the least of it.

I do not say the deal is impossible. Sanctions get waived, ports reopen, inventories turn out to be more flexible than a leader’s inventory claims. I say that a price comparison is not a description of a transaction. It is doing something else, and what it is doing becomes obvious the moment you notice who it is addressed to.

“Substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada.”¹

That is the sentence. The potash is the instrument; Canada is the subject. And the numbers explain why this particular instrument was picked up. Canada shipped about 22.9 million tonnes of potash in 2024, over 39 per cent of global exports, according to figures CTV attributes to the Government of Canada.¹ Its leading destination is the United States, and the US imports nearly 85 per cent of its potash from Canada.¹ Canada’s ten active potash mines are all in Saskatchewan, and that province supplies more than 86 per cent of the American supply that comes from Canada.¹

Belarus, in the 2024 production table CTV sources to Natural Resources Canada, ranks third at 12.1 thousand tonnes and 15.9 per cent of world production, behind Russia at 21.8 per cent and Canada at 32.8 per cent.¹

Look at that table again, because it contains the joke. The two producers ranked immediately after Canada are Russia and Belarus.¹ To replace Canadian potash at scale is to shop at those two rows, and the second of them is the one whose product the EU has sanctioned.¹ Nobody has to say it out loud. It is in the table.

Here is what makes the whole performance readable, and it is on the record from the people who would have to act on it.

In June, the president told reporters there is nothing the United States needs from Canada. His own ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, said America needs a “tremendous amount of things” including Canadian potash, since there are “not lots of other places that you can get it.”¹ That is the administration disagreeing with itself in public about the central fact, and the ambassador’s version is the one the production table supports.

On the Canadian side the premiers have been arguing about whether to use potash as leverage at all. Ontario’s Doug Ford has pushed to retaliate against the tariffs by cutting US access to electricity, oil and other minerals; Alberta’s Danielle Smith and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe have said they are worried about the long-term consequences for those industries.¹ Moe has said his province would not support export taxes or withholding supply, because losing its biggest customer would mean job losses, price hikes and a tremendous hit to the local economy. “The United States of America, most assuredly, would switch to buying potash from other nations around the world. We would lose a long-term customer to some degree,” he said.¹ Smith said in July that using oil and potash as retaliatory measures is “not going to happen.”¹

Read that sequence in order. Saskatchewan’s argument against withholding potash is that the Americans would simply buy it elsewhere. On Monday the president said he was working on a deal to buy it elsewhere.¹ The premier’s warning and the president’s post describe the same manoeuvre from opposite sides of a border, and the warning did not need the deal to be real in order to be useful to the person making it.

Canadian potash has stayed exempt from the tariffs through the trade war; CTV frames the turn toward Belarus as the latest escalation.¹ And it arrives at a specific moment. The report notes that the move comes after Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the ambition for Canada to become the European Union’s first associate member.¹ We wrote about that meeting in Canada is buying insurance in Europe.³ CTV places the potash announcement after that development.¹ A country hedges toward Europe; then a commodity for which it is the leading exporter, and the United States the leading destination, is publicly shopped elsewhere.¹ I will not tell you those two facts are cause and effect, because neither source says so. I will say that if you were Ottawa, you would file them together.

So, the ledger, and it is short. A president said he was working on a “massive deal” for a commodity whose named supplier said on the same day that its volumes for the year are contracted and none are free.¹² That supplier’s product is under EU sanctions, and CTV reports it has been barred from exporting via Klaipeda since February 2022.¹ The world’s second and third largest producers of the stuff are Russia and Belarus.¹ And the administration’s own ambassador has said there are not lots of other places you can get it.¹ What was published on Monday was, above all, a price comparison with Canada.¹ Who it was aimed at is my reading rather than the report’s, and I would put it this way: the merit of a threat is not whether it can be carried out, but whether the person hearing it can afford to find out.