Tag: Capital
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On the relationship between Conflict and Food Security.
I started in Agriculture because I wondered what better way to help people is there, than dignity? How can people lower in the pyramid make better decisions? What I found was that there is a remarkable correlation between hunger and conflict… Every capital allocator who has looked at African agriculture in the past decade has…
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Creating models that don’t become white elephants.
Economic corridors are security architecture. I want to be precise about that. Not “important infrastructure.” Not “development investment.” Security architecture. The kind that nation-states need to function without being held hostage to a single geography, a single origin, a single season. The missing piece in African infrastructure investment isn’t productive capacity. West Africa has that.…
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How to develop a framework for an Integrated Agro Industrial Park (IAIP).
An integrated agro-industrial corridor is not a trading operation, a farming collective, or a logistics company. It’s a vertically integrated system where production, processing, and export are architecturally synchronised. That distinction matters because the architecture is what determines whether the system works. This paper describes what that system looks like operationally, why each component is…
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Why big farms and processors in West Africa can’t scale.
West Africa produces 187 million metric tonnes of agricultural output annually. Less than 8% reaches structured markets. That gap is not agricultural. It’s infrastructural. This is a paper about the specific constraint that prevents West African supply from reaching institutional buyers at scale, why previous solutions have failed to address it, and what the architecture…
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From selling aromatic herbs into the EU, to watching cash crops rot.
I was selling dried aromatic herbs into the European market. Peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, lemon, Verbena, chamomile… Yes, growing chamomile in Ghana. Varieties I’d chosen because European buyers wanted them, not because they were easiest to grow. The margins were extraordinary. The buyers were committed. We had contracts that specified price, volume, and quality. And…
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Most Agro Industrial Parks Fail… what can be done about it?
Most agricultural infrastructure projects fail not because of bad crops or bad markets — but because of bad architecture. After 15 years building Volta Presentation Farms, here’s what I learned about building systems that last.