Thanks, Karen.
Fertilizer markets are driven globally by supply and demand. The demand comes from growers around the world who buy the products.
Fundamentally, underpinning the market for a while has been a decline in global grain stocks, grains and oilseeds. The stocks of those products have been low for a time. That sends an important signal to growers around the world to produce more. The way you produce more food is by using more fertilizer. We've had a surge in demand for fertilizer products on a global basis.
As Karen had mentioned, over the last year there have been a number of global events that have disrupted supply. We had weather events in the United States. New Orleans and Florida are both important fertilizer manufacturing areas. We had one of our nitrogen facilities in western Canada that had to go down for technical reasons. China had strongly curtailed its exports of fertilizer in order to meet its own domestic demand.
Even before the invasion by Russia, the Russian government had restricted exports of fertilizer. Further, the high cost of natural gas in Europe had led to one of our large manufacturers in the U.K. stopping its production, because the cost of natural gas was simply too high.
All these events had come together over the last one to two years to lead to a very tight market for fertilizer, even before current events.