5 farmer losses) since it misses how the ban (unintentionally) helps workers by scaling down this transfer scheme. The interaction of these two policies carries a paradoxical implication: an import ban—one of the most distortive industrial policy tools (McDonald et al., 2024)—can partially offset the distortions created by domestic fertilizer subsidies—another industrial policy tool. When trade policy is modeled as a shock to multiplicative trade costs rather than as a quantitative restriction, the model fails to account for the import “rents” that are created by the policy, thus overestimating welfare costs.<sup>12</sup>

**Related Literature** Our quantification of the costs of lack of access to fertilizer in general equilibrium adds to an extensive literature that evaluates the effects of fertilizer (or, more broadly, of modern agricultural inputs) on yields, which mainly uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (Beaman et al., 2013; Carter et al., 2021; Duflo et al., 2008, 2011). While small-scale field experiments are essential in assessing local effects, they do not inform on GE effects once the intervention is scaled up (Bergquist et al., 2023; Muralidharan and Niehaus, 2017). For example, while providing fertilizer to a few farmers may not affect the rural labor market, a large-scale change in fertilizer availability may shift rural labor demand enough to affect wages.<sup>13</sup> In contrast, our setting of a nationwide, sudden, and unprecedented fertilizer shortage is ideal for estimating the costs of a lack of fertilizer for an entire country. We show that our model-implied crop-specific partial equilibrium (PE) elasticities of yield with respect to fertilizer use replicate the values reported in seminal RCT studies (Beaman et al., 2013; Carter et al., 2021) but are substantially larger than our corresponding model-implied GE elasticities. This is because some of the negative yield effects of fertilizer price increases are offset by endogenous adjustments in crop prices and wages. Our contribution includes deriving analytical expressions for both PE and GE elasticities.

Our paper is complementary to recent work by Bergquist et al. (2023), who develop a spatial model of agriculture and trade to quantify the effects of large-scale agricultural policies such as provision of agricultural inputs. In contrast, we analyze a unique trade policy experiment involving the near-complete removal of fertilizer, rather than the provision of subsidized inputs, whose takeup ultimately depends on the decision of the farmer (Duflo et al., 2011; Suri, 2011). Notably, an underappreciated feature of the global fertilizer market is that most countries rely almost entirely on imports to obtain their fertilizer (Brooks and Donovan, 2024). We provide a framework to model the impact of trade policy on fertilizer access and the associated costs of limited access. Our paper also complements Artuc et al. (2023), who examine the impact of conflict on global agricultural trade, including a simulation where Russia and Ukraine restrict fertilizer exports. While such

> 12While a quantitative restriction-induced price increase creates a price wedge that is captured by domestic importers, a price increases that is driven by an increase in trade costs is entirely lost to nature.

> 13A further limitation of these randomized trials is that they are typically conducted on closely supervised experimental plots, so returns may differ from those on real-world farms (Beaman et al., 2013; Duflo et al., 2011).