Michael Rahm
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
All right. Good morning Adam. I am glad you asked the question, because people I think are questioning demand growth in this commodity price environment. And I think one of the things you need to look at, the affordability index. We publish that each week on our web sites, last week, and let me just say, the affordability index is simply a ratio of ag commodity prices and crop nutrient prices. Last week that was 0.88, and I think many people are looking back to the 2008 period and saying, my gosh, we are going to be in the same soup here, given the drop off in ag commodity prices. But just if you contrast today with 2008; if you go back to the peak of that affordability index, that peaked at 1.55 back in the first week of August in 2008, and at that time, the price of urea I think was $780, the price of DAP was $1,078, the price of MOP was $918. And interestingly, if you look at the price of ag commodities at that time, price of corn was 5.22, little bit higher than the 3.62 today and the price of soybeans was 12.43, not a heck of a lot different than the 12.21 that we see today. So affordability, when we got our input from the geographies, our guidance was, I think in terms of an affordability index, similar to where we are at today. So that's kind of the background in terms of the -- how the forecast was put together in the guidance. In terms of where the increases are coming from, in the case of phosphate, we expect growth in India, and a little bit further growth in Brazil, with most of the other regions remaining about flat, and in a few regions, maybe a small decline and particularly in North America, if we see corn acres drop down into the 90 million acre range next year, we could see slightly lower shipments. In the case of potash, generally we see a pretty positive growth across the board, again, led by rebounds in India, also further growth we think in Brazil and China. So as I said before, in the case of potash, we are projecting another 2 million tonne increase in shipments or about a 4% increase. So hopefully that, I think, covers the basis in terms of that question about what does 2015 look like at this point.