Latest thinking
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The Forgotten Foundation. We will always need food.
Every civilization is built twice. First biologically, then economically. Before institutions exist, before markets function, before technology advances, people have to survive. They need food. They need energy. They need health. Without those things, everything else is theatre. Yet the more advanced a society becomes, the easier it is to forget this. The systems that…
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Real Development
Poverty is an output of how systems are built, not a character flaw. Why real development means redesigning the conditions that keep producing it.
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How to incentivize in a farming organization.
An operator paid to run your asset follows the contract. An operator with equity protects its value. Why ownership beats contracts over a 30 year horizon.
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Storage. The right entry point for the Corridor creation.
I watched grain rot in a Volta warehouse. If you are building an agricultural corridor, you do not start with the farm. You start with storage.
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Derivative product revenue is the only honest framework.
Selling raw crops means the buyer sets the price. The difference between commodity revenue and derivative product revenue decides who captures the margin.
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On the relationship between Conflict and Food Security.
Investors ask how risky West Africa is. Almost nobody asks how exposed the alternative is. What the Black Sea disruption revealed about food security risk.
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Farmers do, what Farmers are. Farming.
Most agricultural projects start at the field and hope a market appears at harvest. Why supply-side optimisation plateaus, and what to design instead.
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An ecosystem problem that involves food; Food Security
West Africa grows more grain than ever and loses more of it than ever. Production is not the constraint. Food security is a systems problem.
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Creating models that don’t become white elephants.
Economic corridors are security architecture, not development investment. What Saudi Arabia understood about food supply that most institutions still miss.
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Developing a system that actually closes the loop.
Fifteen years in West African agriculture, much of it running operations in Ghana, taught me the friction was structural. Why I stopped patching the system and started closing the loop.