Santos and Cubtão are a phosphate hub

source: http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5376e/y5376e08.htm
Some of today’s large Brazilian fertilizer companies were already operating at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Until the beginning of the 1960s, the domestic demand for fertilizer raw materials was met essentially by imports. Local production was limited to phosphate rock from a mine discovered in the 1940s in the State of São Paulo, to an ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate and calcium ammonium nitrate plant and to some producers of single superphosphate.
In the second half of the 1960s, new single superphosphate plants and the first complex fertilizer plant were constructed, marking the beginning of phosphoric acid production in the country. This enterprise also installed the first large-scale unit for the production of anhydrous ammonia, nitric and sulphuric acids, ammonium nitrate and DAP (diammonium phosphate). Other new projects became operational during the following decade.
Starting in 1971, the demand for fertilizers increased considerably, mainly as a consequence of agricultural development in the Cerrado in Central Brazil. This was constrained, however, by the need for additional imports at rising cost. This increasing demand, associated with high prices on the international market as a consequence of the conflict in the Near East and other factors, resulted, in 1974, in the development of the National Program for Fertilizers and Agricultural Limestone (PNFCA), whose main objective was the expansion and modernization of the fertilizer and agricultural limestone industry in Brazil. This program stimulated investment in several fertilizer and raw material complexes.
In the early 1990s, the fertilizer sector in Brazil underwent an intense privatization process, in which a substantial proportion of raw material production, until then undertaken the by state-owned companies, was transferred to the private sector.
The company responsible for the only production of potassium chloride in Brazil was transferred to the private sector. Some subsidiaries of a state-owned company producing a substantial portion of the nation’s phosphate and nitrogen fertilizers also were later privatized. Summaries of the capacities of the main producers of raw materials and fertilizers respectively are presented in Tables 8 and 9. Their geographical location is illustrated in Figure 6.
At least 250 mixed NPK compound fertilizers plants are located in the different agricultural areas of the country.