Dissecting Extreme Price Fluctuations in Mineral Fertilizers: Regularities and Co‐Movements in Light of Global Food Security

Extreme swings in food prices can put food security at risk. Fertilizer prices are among the main drivers of food prices. This work explores the recurrent behavior of the extreme global fertilizer price fluctuations underlying food price dynamics. Extreme fertilizer price fluctuations show up every few years when located in the 10% tails and up to every few decades in the 0.1% tails of the distribution. For most global fertilizer prices, no significant differences are detected between the durations of recurring extreme peak‐peak and trough‐trough fluctuations, on the one hand, and the durations and amplitudes of booms and busts, on the other. Extreme global fertilizer price fluctuations co‐move, showing in most cases higher phase concordance during recent periods of global turbulence. This allows policy makers to exploit reference extreme fluctuations as a benchmark to design and implement more homogeneous policies targeting global fertilizer prices.