Since late August, the head of Yara, a Norwegian fertilizer manufacturer, has cut down its production by two-thirds across its numerous European plants, three of which are located in France. The soaring price of natural gas, which constitutes its raw material (it is transformed using nitrogen to make fertilizer and several other by-products), has made them no longer profitable. "If you take urea (one of the products manufactured in his plants), for example, when we decided to close, it was costing us $2,000 per ton to make while it was selling for $800. The same ton costs $200 to produce in the United States and $100 in Russia."
