What It's Like to Do Big Ag Business in Venezuela and Ukraine

Summary

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Odd Lots Podcast Summary

Episode: "What It's Like to Do Big Ag Business in Venezuela and Ukraine"

Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway (Bloomberg)
Guests: Jeff Kazen and Mike Rolfson (Co-founders, Agris Academy; former senior executives at Cargill)
Date: January 29, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Odd Lots dives into the realities of running large-scale agricultural businesses in two of the world’s most challenging economies: Venezuela and Ukraine. Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway draw on the deep experience of their guests, Jeff Kazen and Mike Rolfson—both with decades at Cargill—to explore the impact of collapsing institutions, currency hyperinflation, infrastructure breakdown, and the resilience required to operate amid dire instability. The conversation moves from post-Soviet Ukraine’s hopeful chaos to Venezuela's spiral under Chavez and Maduro, providing a ground-level view of how commerce actually happens when rule of law and supply chains are perpetually under threat.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Disconnection Between Natural Resources and Commercial Extraction

• The presence of "assets in the ground," such as oil or grain, is only a small part of the commercial equation; the necessities include reliable infrastructure, rule of law, and functioning markets.
• Joe notes: "There’s really not much of a connection...between the existence of natural resources in the ground and some way to get them out commercially, anywhere." (02:28)

2. Career Histories and Early Pioneering in Emerging Markets

• Jeff Kazen: 30 years at Cargill, rising through grain trading, executive roles, and joint ventures across vegetable oils and aquaculture; played a key role in Venezuela’s packaged oils business during its decline.
• Mike Rolfson: Sent to Ukraine in 1995 to set up Cargill’s presence from scratch; witnessed the shift from a Soviet system to chaotic capitalism, building real commercial activity from nothing. "It was five wonderful years…taking it from a theoretical representative office to seven or eight business units and hundreds of millions invested." (07:36)

3. Venezuela: From Wealthy Potential to Dysfunctional Reality

• Cargill’s businesses included salt, flour milling, oil bottling, rice, and pasta—often extending all the way to consumer branding.
• Venezuela was once seen as a rich, natural market for food conglomerates.
• Hyperinflation destroyed the domestic economy: "The currency ceased to function and that really changed the game on the ground in Venezuela." (10:04, Jeff)
• Kazen describes how quickly the bolivar diminished: "The BTU value of a paper boulevard was worth more than it could buy. You could burn it for fuel." (21:09, Jeff)
• As public sector collapse deepened, simply keeping the plants open became a multi-front currency and logistics battle: bartering, desperate efforts for parts, and ultimately a mass exodus of skilled employees.

4. Ukraine: Optimism and the Challenge of Corruption

• Rolfson recalls incredible optimism and a true pioneering spirit after the Soviet collapse, spanning both young market entrants and veterans of the old system.
• Early business adversities included both state bureaucracy and endemic corruption: "Most of the infrastructure and there were gatekeepers at various stages that could easily be catalyzed…We went straight to the farms...with people we could trust and just gutted it out." (22:33, Mike)
• Their approach was not to pay bribes, but to circumvent corrupted structures with “old-school” direct contracting—rewarding, if exhausting.

5. Currency Chaos and Adapting to Financial Dysfunction

• Venezuelan hyperinflation eventually required daily improvisation. Importing any material, even spare parts, demanded access to hard currency, forcing companies into odd barter and export-for-currency schemes.
• "At some point...we will put no more dollars in the country," Kazen recalls. "We were having to try to figure out how to generate enough dollars just to get spare parts." (28:22, Jeff)
• Both guests note the rise of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins (e.g., Tether) as tools for escaping failed fiat currencies, with stories of Venezuelans using early bitcoin mining as a lifeline. "There’s a lot of great stories around early bitcoin mining...where they’d tap into a small hydro plant, mine bitcoin...and had it as their escape valve." (31:35, Mike)

6. Brain Drain and Infrastructure Breakdown

• Venezuela lost a huge wave of its best-educated and most experienced workforce as conditions deteriorated.
• "The first wave [of emigrants]...were the most educated, the most skilled. It compounded itself, right, because now nobody knows how to run the electricity generation station..." (36:22, Jeff)
• Multinationals like Cargill tried to employ displaced Venezuelans elsewhere: "That played out hundreds of times inside my employer...Talented, smart, educated. We gladly re-employed them." (39:33, Jeff)
• Assets left unguarded were stripped: "You walk into a plant that you shut down...there’ll be nothing there. Unless it's running, you can't expect much." (40:54, Jeff)
• Security and constant vigilance became the norm for shipments and warehouse operations.

7. Corruption, Compliance, and Comparative Advantage

• Strict adherence to anti-bribery rules made some deals impossible but in the long run enhanced corporate reputation.
• Acting honestly built trust with other multinationals, especially for food safety: "It actually draws business to you...that brand helps out in these environments because the customers can count on you." (25:40, Jeff)

8. The Role of Multinationals as 'Nations'

• Hosts observe that multinationals, due to their scale and practices, establish internal “islands” of rule of law, security, and stability, which can provide a slice of developed-world predictability even in failing states.
• "Large companies are sort of...nations unto themselves...the moment you leave that office, you are out of that." (54:00, Joe)

9. Human Capital and the Realities of War (Ukraine Update)

• Today, Ukraine’s grain sector is hampered by war damage to core infrastructure, labor shortages, and a pivot back to more basic, low-input crops.
• "They're incredibly resilient people...it isn't like it's that distant in their past." (47:05, Mike)
• Wheat dominates, as it’s cheaper to grow and more practical given infrastructure limitations. "You can kind of get away [with wheat] with lesser intensive agronomic crops like wheat to still eke out a pretty darn good crop." (49:33, Mike)

10. Lessons for Multinationals Entering High-Risk Markets

• Jeff: "Start with a small business…treat that as a learning curve or…paying tuition before you jump in and make those big hard capital asset investments." (50:42)
• Mike: "The blueprint is there, it’s just going to take resilient people, patience, and an ability to go with the flow for the foreseeable future." (51:39)

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• Joe (02:28): "Assets in the ground or anywhere mean nothing without the sort of rule of law, refining, processing, shipping infrastructure, etc."
• Jeff (10:04): “The currency ceased to function and that really changed the game on the ground in Venezuela.”
• Jeff (21:09): “The BTU value of a paper bolivar was worth more than it could buy…you could burn it for fuel.”
• Mike (22:33): "We went straight to the farms in smaller quantities in reasonable amounts with people we could trust and just gutted it out through atypical ways of getting the grain out of the country."
• Jeff (25:40): "It actually draws business to you…that brand helps out in these environments because the customers can count on you."
• Jeff (28:22): “At some point...we will put no more dollars in the country...We were having to try to figure out how to generate enough dollars just to get spare parts.”
• Mike (31:35): "There’s a lot of great stories...where they’d tap into a small hydro plant...and mine bitcoin, put it on a wallet and had it as their escape valve."
• Jeff (36:22): "The first wave, the first…were the most educated, the most skilled. It compounded itself…now nobody knows how to run the electricity generation station."
• Tracy (55:30): "You would assume with maybe this new relationship with the US, access to dollars maybe will get a little bit easier. But…it was fascinating to hear from Jeff just how creative they got when it came to securing dollars."
• Jeff (50:42): “Start with a small business…treat that as a learning curve or…paying tuition before you jump in and make those big hard capital asset investments.”
• Mike (51:39): “The blueprint is there, it’s just going to take resilient people, patience, attempting to maintain your teams…and see how this all plays out.”

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Segment Highlights and Timestamps

• Intro and Contextual Discussion of Venezuela's Situation: 01:43–05:08
• Guest Introductions and Career Overviews: 05:29–08:24
• Venezuela Business Operations & Onset of Hyperinflation: 08:50–14:06
• Ukraine: Early Post-Soviet Challenges and Optimism: 14:06–16:13
• Logistics, Communication, and Risk Management in Both Countries: 16:13–18:36
• Corruption, Compliance, and Multinational Adherence to Ethics: 21:47–26:59
• Battling Currency Collapse and Finding Hard Currency: 27:24–31:34
• Crypto and Stablecoin Adoption in Dysfunctional Currencies: 31:34–33:17
• Venezuela’s Brain Drain and Migration: 35:59–40:16
• Plant Asset Breakdown, Security Risks: 40:16–45:53
• Ukraine’s Modern Struggles and Adapting Crop Mix: 46:36–50:18
• Advice to Future Multinational Entrants: 50:18–52:33
• Host Reflections on Multinational ‘Nationhood’ and Final Thoughts: 53:02–56:24

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Tone & Language

The episode is rich in personal anecdotes, candid about difficulties and failures, and colored by the hosts’ curiosity and the guests’ wry, hard-won pragmatism. The conversation is honest about setbacks but also energized by tales of adaptability and resilience.

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Memorable Moments

• Jeff’s story about the bolivar’s paper being worth more as fuel (21:09) offers a stark image of currency collapse.
• Mike’s recounting of bitcoin mining serving as a secret lifeline for Venezuelans fleeing the regime (31:35) illustrates extreme creativity forced by crisis.
• The revelation that multinationals often serve as rare “islands” of stability and safety for their employees amid crumbling national systems (54:00).

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For anyone interested in global business, operational risk, or the real-world consequences of macroeconomic failure, this episode offers a rare, ground-level account of what it truly takes to keep commerce moving in the world’s hardest places.

Transcript

[Barclays Brief Narrator]

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[Tracy Alloway]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

And I'm Joe Wiesenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

Jo One of the big topics of discussion There are a lot of topics of discussion nowadays, but when it comes to the recent takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration's takeover of Venezuela, I don't know how acquisition, I don't know how to describe it, but the action in Venezuela, one of the themes or things that you saw people talking about was this idea that, well, even if the goal is to get more oil, Venezuela's oil industry is a mess.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

It's in shambles.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. So you hear things about ships that are rusting in the dock and pumps that don't work and whatever. People talking about really creaky infrastructure and also just a bad environment for doing business.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, I mean this is the thing. And so in the Venezuela specific context, we know that the oil infrastructure has been degraded for years, which is why there is all these numbers about the massive amounts of upfront investment that would be required to get the oil started. But then there is this other phenomenon that's global, which is that there's really not much of a connection per se between the existence of Natural resources in the ground and some way to get them out commercially, anywhere. This also happens to be the case in Greenland. It happens to be the case in Western Australia, which is a very like well run country, which is that assets in the ground or anywhere mean nothing without the sort of rule of law, refining, processing, shipping infrastructure, etc. So all these places of various different degrees, the actual existence of some asset, in Venezuela's case, oil. That's only part of the story.

[Tracy Alloway]

Absolutely. So this got me thinking, what is it like to actually do some sort of industrial business in a place like Venezuela? And I always wanted to do more on the Venezuelan economy. Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting and more interesting now. So that is exactly what we're going to do today. We're also going to talk about doing business in another hot spot. Hot spot. Hotspot is a good way of putting it, which is Ukraine.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Right. We did a number of episodes immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine talk about the effects on the grain business. But the important thing which we didn't get into that much, although I think we did a little bit, is like, well, the grain business, the wheat export business, it still exists, it was impaired. But then the day to day business of running a commercial operation in that intense environment, how that changes and so forth and so forth, how does that change under the new competitive strains? And I just want to say one more thing, which is, you know when you talked about, well, what is the right word now to describe our relationship with Venezuela? I've been thinking about a lot of this too because.

[Tracy Alloway]

Do you have a word?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

No, I don't because it's very context dependent. Right. If you were to listen to the administration, you're like, oh, Maduro was arrested.

[Mike Rolfson]

Right.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

If you believe this was a flagrant violation of international law, you'd say he was kidnapped, et cetera. There's almost no words to describe it. You saw the president talking about already selling Venezuelan oil, so whose oil is this already? It's just a, it's a very odd situation to say the least.

[Tracy Alloway]

Definitely. Okay, so speaking of odd situations, we have the perfect guest to talk about them.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

And just, I just got to say I got a headline. US seeks immediate talks on acquiring Greenland. Trump says so at some point we will have another conversation about weird relationships with parts of the world that we didn't think about as much.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, the Greenland economy episode is, is yet to come, inevitably going to arrive. Okay, so we're going to be speaking with Jeff Kazen. He is the co founder of Agris Acade, and also the other co founder, Mike Rolfson. So, Jeff and Mike, thank you so much for coming on opbots. Really appreciate it.

[Mike Rolfson]

Thanks for having us.

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, thanks for having us.

[Tracy Alloway]

So, first of all, why don't you give us a sort of nutshell summary of your career history, because this is why we're talking to you. Both of you had very long, interesting careers at Cargill, which is, you know, one of the massive, massive agricultural conglomerates, among other things. So talk to us about why, why we're talking to you, I guess.

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, I guess I'll start out this. Jeff Kazen. I. I did a full career in Cargill, 30 years and, you know, started at the ground up, you know, at, you know, Baton Rouge, Louisiana ports. Buying grain to go to export was ahead of wheat trading. Did a lot of wheat trading at some point, spent some time in their mergers acquisition shop around the world looking at various businesses. Ended up as a CEO of a joint venture between Cargill and Monsanto at the time, switched over into the vegetable oils, particularly the refined vegetable oils. Was the head of trading for the. What we call the west, so the Western hemisphere on the refined oil side, and that's actually where my time with Venezuela was connected. Cargo had a very large oils business there, actually a packaged oils business. And I finished up my career in the feed side. A lot of aquaculture, very large salmon feeders around the world, shrimp, all kinds of various aquaculture. And then really the western side, South, Latin America on the feed side, all the way to Argentina. So a typical, highly varied cardio career.

[Mike Rolfson]

Similar story with me back then when Jeff and I started, you know, Cargill intentionally threw you around in many different places. So, Yeah, I had three different domestic roles in the. In the early to mid-90s that got your feet wet in different markets in the United States. And I also was involved on the export side out of Houston, you know, similar to what Jeff did. And then about five years in, I got tapped on the shoulder to go to Ukraine. There was no real commercial presence for Cargill then. I was.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

What year are we talking about this was.

[Mike Rolfson]

This would have been April of 1995.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Okay.

[Mike Rolfson]

Yeah. So I was. I was young, I was single. I spoke Russian. I was perhaps tongue in cheek.

[Tracy Alloway]

You ticked all the boxes.

[Mike Rolfson]

Expendable and, you know, with a. With a blank slate that not really knowing what was going on at the time and probably rather difficult to find people to come there. You know, I had raised my hand already to go and. And fortunately, they circled back to me and gave me that opportunity. And it was five wonderful years there. Taking it basically from a, from a theoretical representative office to I think, I think we had seven or eight business units and a couple hundred million dollars invested. So it was a wonderful experience over those five years. And I also was with Jeff in the merger and acquisition shop shortly after returning and went into corporate ventures for a while after that and left Cargill a little earlier than Jeff did and went through ag tech and agtech oriented venture capital. Then about three years ago we kicked this off.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I hope you guys are cool with us turning this into a five hour conversation now because I imagine there's an incredible number of stories and I already have a billion questions. So we're going to be doing a little bit of that on the fly. Jeff, talk to us about the years you did business with Venezuela and maybe the difference in what years those were and then the sort of different conditions from like the beginning to the end as you saw them.

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, so because of the oils business, I was attached to that. And I'd like to say that it was a varied business. And I ended up, and I had a lot of grain experience too. So I ended up kind of the head of overseeing trading for all of it. And probably the, the biggest statement is I think when I started the boulevard, the currency was like 1 to 800. And this is. And I get my years right. And I think, you know, three years later it was like 1 to 12,000 or something like that. You ended up, we ended up in that period of super hyperinflation where the economy basically seizes up. And you know, you watch from the capability. If you don't have a functioning currency and the government makes you sell in local currency, in order to go, you have to have some way to exchange it. And we effectively became dependent on the government to do the exchange to go out and buy dollarized raw materials. Right now, 80% of global trade is still in dollars and a lot of the grain trade is. And that probably is the most single telling thing. The currency ceased to function and that really changed the game on the ground in Venezuela.

[Tracy Alloway]

I want to get into some of the currency complications in a little bit, but I was surprised that Cargill had any business at all in Venezuela. Can you just tell us what exactly Cargill was doing over there?

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, and keep in mind, I'm currently a former employee and Cargill does not own the business there anymore. Was reached out to by Cargill. Basically. This is very typical of Cargill. They'll have females, they'll go in they go out, they'll start with females. They'll they had the long term salt. Salt was a big play there. Cargill is a large producer globally of salt. A lot of things quietly, I think there was a lot of industrial use salt there. They had the petrochemical business was using salt. I don't actually amount an expert on the petrochemical side. And then there are lots of food processing businesses around the world. In this case, you know they were natural flour millers, oil refineries, oil bottlers. The rice I had not seen anywhere else in the world. It was actually gone by the time I got there. Pasta plants. So in this case, probably more unique thing was that not only were we doing primary processing but we were going all the way to consumer. They actually had a very, I think the number one brand that they had bought over time. I think there was an acquisition from Bunge predates me in there also. So they were, you know, this was a very wealthy country and a place where you could do some very good business in and then repeat that model in multiple countries all over the world. And so yeah, that's how they got there. It was very natural flow and they had a very large investment there.

[Barclays Brief Narrator]

Today's markets move fast. Get the insights you need in 10 minutes with the Barclays Brief, a new podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. Through with sharp dialogue and scenario based analysis, our leading experts analyze key market themes each week. So whether you're managing a portfolio or leading a business, the Barclays Brief podcast can help you make smarter decisions today. Stay sharp, stay briefed. Find Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Jeff Kazen]

Investing Brokerage Services by open to the Public Investing Inc.

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[Jeff Kazen]

Output is for informational purposes only and.

[Public.com Advertiser]

Is not an investment recommendation or advice.

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[Joe Wiesenthal]

Mike on Ukraine. You know, 1995 is still the early days of real post Soviet optimism, right? And people hadn't become jaded yet, and they probably hadn't woken up to sort of all the various pathologies and stuff that would occur in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, et cetera. Talk a little bit about the calculation and the hopes for Ukraine and the degree to which, you know, over the many years that you've paid attention to this market and worked in it, how they unfolded relative to, say, expectations.

[Mike Rolfson]

Well, I almost would say you underestimated the optimism at the time. You know, in 95, there was a tremendous amount of optimism there. We had a very dynamic team, quite frankly, even the older folks that we would find to help be a part of what we were doing commercially, even though all they had known is the system. There were folks that were experienced and hard working and very excited to jump into the sort of things that we were doing in a very differentiated way. So we had rock stars in our group that were 22 and out of school, and we had rock stars that were 60 years old that were probably at some sort of legacy experience in agriculture in the Soviet Union, but was able to translate that to us. And it was an absolutely fantastic experience back then. It was more than just a job. It was. You felt it was transformational, it was. You were changing the way business got done there. There was, there was an insane amount of chaos, but working in a regimented, ethical way got you business by, by, you know, in another route. So, yeah, we made it work. It was, it was classic Cargill at the time, sort of being sort of pioneering and entrepreneurial. And, yeah, we made it work and started with the trading side and slowly but surely put assets on the ground and a lot of other more formal things that made it look more and more like a regular geography. By the time, you know, the year 2000 rolled around and when I left.

[Tracy Alloway]

So Mike, you are on the ground in Ukraine and Jeff, you are managing the Venezuela business remotely. What was that actually like? Because I imagine, you know, we're talking about a couple decades back now. Communication must have been more difficult than it is even nowadays.

[Jeff Kazen]

It was very typical. I wouldn't say, you know, there was, we had leading edge as four hundreds back in the day. And so communications had always been a priority of a trading firm. And so there was a lot of investment in that. Right. You know, that was very typical that you would have one. Now remember, I'm a trading manager, not the overall business manager, but I would have, you know, we would have local merchants in each country and you've got to connect and coordinate that. You know, think about if you're buying, say you're buying a multi grocery boat cargo, you're going to load that cargo in New Orleans with all kinds of different commodities and it's going to, you know, you're going to leverage that out to get your freight costs down and create competitive advantage. And so you're coordinating all your different trading groups in the region and then that actually goes out on a global basis. So you're constantly looking for that edge. So I play the coordination role and then at the local level you have to have local expertise on the ground, particularly in the cases Venezuela started to become unstable. You need people that understand how to navigate the government, how to navigate the various channels to get things and continue to get things done. And that takes local know how. So that was kind of that big picture role that I would be filling and of course the risk management side. And then you have that very local execution side to make things happen. And you got to have both.

[Mike Rolfson]

Yeah, and the same proxy existed for us, at least in our external communication and how we linked up. So my, my usual routes of communication went through our Geneva office and then you know, outward throughout the, throughout the rest of Cargill. So the external communication was world class. We had satellite phones through which we ran our modems and that kind of thing early on, at least internal, a whole different story. I could probably waste 45 minutes explaining just simple sending a fax type story and things like that in 1995 and 1996, but before things got a little bit better integrated. But yeah, it was a dichotomy between internal and external, but manageable nonetheless.

[Tracy Alloway]

One of my first journalism jobs was literally monitoring the fax machine and making sure if a fax came in that the newsroom would be aware of it. Thrilling.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Times we could easily do an hour on internal communications and the sort of like pre email, pre slack, pre ib. The pre IB era is very long ago, but pre, you know, pre digital document management in general and how that must have been. And maybe we'll have you back just to talk one day about that. Jeff. I remember I had a. Is interesting enough I forgot about this, but when my first year of college, I had a roommate who I think had done some mission work for his church in Venezuela and he was there when he, by the time he was roommates, he was talking about, oh, this guy Hugo Chavez, it looks like he's going to win, this is going to be bad news etc and so should have taken that more seriously and paid more attention. What was though the point a lot of people were concerned about Chavez, obviously. What was the point though in which you sort of saw like, okay, this is, this is turning down and what was it and what was the process by which like oh, we're starting to get serious inflation. We are starting to have a more difficult time doing business or importing dollar denominated machinery. When did that sort of sink in for the business?

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, so I, I arrived. We were already to Maduro. So we were already. So Chavez, the time there had already passed. And you know, it, it's the, it's the frog in the boiling pot, right? It starts small and then it starts to, you know, and then you get all these unintended consequences and you're, you're trying to. And then, you know, as a socialist regime, you're trying to plug holes, right? And all these things that start to go on. And plus, you know, the, you also have a government that is healthily paranoid about being overthrown, right? There's a power aspect that's going on. All of this at the same time. I think it really, really took a plunge. I mean it wasn't good at Chavez. But when the currency and they, if, you know, as you said, the oil industry starts to deteriorate, so that spigot of dollars is drying off. It takes ever more dollars to pay off everybody in the system, right? It's a constant payoff system. And then you just, you don't have enough money so you just run the printing press, right? And I remember this, there was a point it got, it happened so fast. A couple stories. One is the BTU of a paper boulevard. The BTU value was worth more than it could buy. You could burn it.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

So you literally burn them for fuel.

[Jeff Kazen]

You could burn it for fuel.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

That's crazy.

[Jeff Kazen]

And There was a time where they were having the boulevards printed, but they didn't pay their printing bill and they were flying it. The printing was being done in dollars outside the country. They didn't have enough money to buy the boulevards to fly them in. So you started running out of currency on the ground. Even if you wanted to work on it. There's all kinds of these kind of stories. But it was right in that probably two years into Maduro space when the currency stopped functioning. That was really when we knew we were in trouble.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Just to go back to something you said, so an American company working in any foreign country has to abide by American laws, particularly related to things like bribery and corruption. And maybe for both of you, and I imagine you know that this is a very prominent issue in both these countries, maybe more in Venezuela than Ukraine, et cetera, but we know that there's significant corruption in Ukraine, etc. Can you talk a little bit about essentially how you function in these environments where probably lots of people are getting paid off literally or in the bribery sense and how you have to navigate that from the perspective of a multinational?

[Mike Rolfson]

I'll start.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Sure.

[Mike Rolfson]

And going back again, within the perspective of the mid-90s, there were two impediments. And I use the word impediment, not that it impeded us, but it did create a headwind for, shall we say, the ease of doing business and the scale of doing business. So the two parts that created impediments for us is there still was a fair amount of governmental influence in the grain business in 1995 and it really was from a county perspective and a state, or what they refer to as obelisk perspective all the way up to the central government. So there were plenty of ways to keep those people happy and quietly by grain at scale that would also go through a state owned railroad system and a state owned port system. So most of the infrastructure and there were gatekeepers at various stages that could easily be catalyzed, shall we say, to get grain out the door at very reasonable numbers and trade at large scale. And I would, I could name names, but I, you know, there, there's plenty of, some of the global traders that don't have to apply to, to the US rule rules based system. So what we basically did is, did it old school. We went straight to the farms in smaller quantities in reasonable amounts with people we could trust and just gutted it out through atypical ways of, of getting the grain out of the country, which ironically is some of the infrastructure that we built. On the Danube river system that it's very lumpy. It's transshipment through cranes and vacuumation systems and things like that, as opposed to a big high scale elevator. Those are some of the things today that are getting grain out of the country because some of the main elevators have been destroyed or damaged in some way. So that was our biggest problem. You could get around it. And quite frankly, it was more rewarding doing it that way because we saw our impact on the AG sector. But that was. That was sort of the big picture reality at the time when I first got there.

[Jeff Kazen]

I think in my case it is comforting as operating is to know you don't have to pay those type of bribes or facilitated payments. The company did a very good job of instilling that everybody who joined trained on it yearly and quite frankly backed it up. Right. If you didn't make your numbers because you would have had to pay to bribe to get there, it didn't hurt you career wise. They knew. You talk about it, you tell them, I'm not going to do this. And it happened. And we had these stories that happened. But it's on that side. It made it very clear for your employees to know how to operate. The other thing I want you to think about in the global food space, right, Is if you're a Nestle or a Frito Lay or one of that and you're buying raw materials, so you have a plant in Venezuela, you want to make sure that you have food safe product, US grade and you know the standards, right. Food safety. You want to actually. It actually draws business to you, Right? Right.

[Tracy Alloway]

The brand value of American food, right.

[Jeff Kazen]

And that you're going to act honestly and they don't have to pay a bribe to get a truck, you know, to the plant on that day, right. The things like that, that the way you can do business. So at that time, let's call them Western companies or now today more modern companies, they like to go to some of these early markets together. And because they knew that they had a supplier that, you know, if you were making malt barley for the brewery, and it's a, you know, South African brewery, they knew that you were actually going to, you know, make a contract and stick to the contract no matter what. If we had to work it out, there was crop failure, you would, you know, hold your word was your bond. And I, you know, I'm going to tip a hat off to my former employer. They were very good about how that operated. And I work with them in places basically in any all the corners of the world and everything from, you know, fish meal to lysine to wheat, that brand helps out in these environments because you, you know, yours, the customers can count on you. And then food super important, right. Because if you screw that up, you can kill somebody and. Or tarnished the customer's brand. Right. If something gets through this, that's the same way it is in the US actually, but not with the. Maybe the same criticality when you're working in a remote location around the world.

[Tracy Alloway]

So this actually leads into something I'm really curious about, which is obviously Cargill is a private company operating at that time under a socialist regime, under Maduro. What was the relationship like just between a private commercial enterprise and a socialist government? Especially for something as critical vehicle as food. Right. I imagine the government cared about the food supply.

[Jeff Kazen]

We help. We had to follow both sets of laws. Right. You have to follow the local law too, Right. So if they say you must transact in boulevards, you have to transact in boulevards. Now we didn't have tether or bitcoin at this point. Right. So the world's changing in an interesting way. You have to follow that. I mean, you don't want to, I don't know, poke the bear. Right. And then you have to have people that become experts in how whatever government you're working with runs. And we do. And that's how it. But this was a very common, still is common to operate in some of these places where, you know, places that have cocoa. Right. You know, some of the African countries there, Zimbabwe. Right. South Africa. You still have this situation. You have to become. There is a competitive advantage of becoming experts at working in difficult places.

[Tracy Alloway]

Were you ever pressured though, for instance, to lower grocery prices?

[Jeff Kazen]

Oh, absolutely, all the time. Right. And there were laws on theoretically how much you could make and how the accounting was done on that. And you know, if we had a global rice shortage, it was not the fact that we had a global rice shortage and prices rising. It was Cargill that was doing it too, you know, to the people. You had to have an escape goat effectively. And you know, at some point you just know that you can't import at price X and sell it for X minus, you know, a bunch and you'll just bleed out. And quite frankly, at some point in several geographies, we get a situation where corporation says, we will put no more dollars in the country. And we were there. And I can still remember that. So if we want to import something, we had to get dollars either from the Government or figure out how to export something that created dollars. So that's where you really start to struggle because you basically are relying on the government to exchange boulevards for dollars. And that's where we tried all kinds of things to try to export. There was salt there, we tried pallets. But every time you tried to do something, somebody in the economy was like grabbing that. Oh no, if you really want to move that, you know, to the port, that's going to require some facilitation payment or something like that. It just. And the team down there was desperately trying it because the other thing we needed beyond just raw materials, we needed spare parts. And this may be lies to your question about what's the situation there. You know, if you need to buy some electrical equipment from Siemens, they're not going to want boulevards, they want euros or dollars. So we were having to try to figure out how to generate enough dollars just to get spare parts. And you know, I'm not sure how and I can only speak from my situation is now the team is really focused instead of kind of on their day to day job of running logistics and parts, you know, and getting things in their jobs switched to how do we originate dollars. So you have, you know, a couple people that are just expert in government and maybe like camp out at government offices for long periods of time trying to figure out winding through the red tape. And then you have people trying to figure out, you know, hey can we, you know, put one ton, one kilo bag or one metric ton bags together of salt that's sitting in this pile and get them out of the country and sell them to generate dollars. So now you have a dollar generation team and that can, that can play out all over Argentina. Before Malay. I don't know what the situation is now was like that also when you have hyper inflation you get into the situation where you have to have a teenage just on $2.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I wasn't expecting the conversation to go in this but for either one of you. And Jeff, you mentioned the non. I wasn't expecting to talk about tether in this episode but in today 2026, when you think about sort of these currency bottlenecks that exist, do cryptocurrencies or whether it's stable coins or something truly decentralized like bitcoin. Are people seriously either implementing or thinking about how some of these new financial technologies can solve pain points within the global ag trade?

[Jeff Kazen]

Mike, this is your specialty.

[Mike Rolfson]

Yeah, well again I can't speak to the specificity, maybe country by country, but certainly if you look maybe in the big picture, the average producer somewhere in the world that has a currency issue where it impedes them and maybe the quality of their bank, their access to capital, their access to foreign currency to upgrade whatever it is. Absolutely the tethers of the world and things like that are going to fundamentally change the access to that sort of thing when you compare it to the way it was before for sure. And I will maybe add a little half answer to what you threw out there too. There's a lot of great stories for folks looking for something to entertain themselves around bitcoin, especially the early bitcoin mining that was going on in Venezuela for people that were concerned about where the country was going, where they would tap into a small hydro plant at maybe a family's place out in the woods somewhere and mine bitcoin, put it on a wallet and had it as their escape valve in case they needed it it and sure enough there was a night where they traipsed through the jungle and went to another country and had it on their wallet and started another life. So yeah, there was some very interesting early pioneering bitcoin stories around what the Bolivar forced folks to do early on.

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[Jeff Kazen]

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[Jeff Kazen]

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[Tracy Alloway]

About people actually leaving Venezuela, because this is also something that you hear a lot about, which is, you know, if you were a Venezuelan with some amount of means in the past, you were very incentivized to leave, especially if you're working in certain businesses that the government was targeting. Did you experience that at Cargill as well? This sort of brain drain?

[Jeff Kazen]

It happened all the time. First, I want to set the scene, right? We have a. At the time, we had an office in Caracas. Very nice, right? A lot of employees there. Not just kind of because we have. We had a brand business, right? We had. Had people that were, you know, label designers. And I mean, it was the full on. Think of it, I don't know, more maybe the Procter and Gamble, the retail side of things. So big office, nice. We had, you know, satellite communications there. There was no Starlink yet. And so the office was a nice place, right? And people actually, you know, they're like, oh yeah, I was there on Saturday. And I'm like, you know, and the problem is, is when you left that office, you zipped to your dated community, more likely an apartment complex. You just had to go from secured compound to secure compound. And then it became, you know, you didn't know if you were having water that week or hot water. You might not have electricity for several days. You might not have access there. Might not be anything to buy in a grocery store. Now our employees were getting some food from us because we made some basics, right? You know, every week we would make sure that we got something transferred from the plants and put this stuff together. So the life style that people lived was not easy even for those that theoretically had, you know, were well educated, had good jobs and eventually even our business, of course, the business is slowing down and they leave. And then of course, in our case, we had a plant that got nationalized at gunpoint. Well, if you're, you know, a highly skilled manager, operator, you don't want to stick around and start to have to do your job at gunpoint, right? Because they don't have any expertise in how to run the plant. So the big wave, the first wave, the first somebody said several million Venezuelans were the most educated, the most skilled. And it compounded itself, right, because, you know, now nobody knows how to run the electricity generation station, right? That nobody knows, you know, obviously the petrochemical industry, right? You can go get re employed around the world, you know, if you're a, you know, petrol engineer, no problem. And so those people went all over the place. And the beauty of working for a multinational is we picked up as many as we could. And that is, you know, in that conversation to bring, you know, you have an employee, they call, they're very nationalistic. They know they're doing important work, they've had enough. And you get that call and they go, you know, it's kind of sheepish. They're like, they feel like they're abandoning you. And you know, we go and find them. My story was, you know, employee, one of my last employees just says, I'm, I'm going to Mexico City. I think his wife had, was working for Sony at the time and had some type of employment. And I said, what are you going to do? And he goes, I don't know, but I'm not going to be here anymore. You know, I mailed my, I mailed my big screen TV and a couple things dhl and I'm going to take my guitars on the plane and I'm done. And I said, well, I know what you're going to do. You're going to go to this address and you're going to work for me in Mexico. And that played out hundreds of times inside my employer. You'd go to a meeting in Mexico City. I still remember management meeting. They run a very large crush refined facility north of Mexico City. And half the, half the people in the room are Venezuelans. Talented, smart, educated. And that, you know, that played out. I know, you know, from my social media, you know, that happened in lots of Western companies. They were very. My experience working with Venezuelans was, it was fantastic. They had a good education system, smart business savvy. And we gladly re employed them around the world.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Sticking with Venezuela for a moment. And we've heard all the numbers about the oil industry and the amount of upfront capital it would take to sort of profitably begin shipping oil at scale or selling oil at scale. What is your understanding like right now of the equivalent within the realms that you're working in grains? Like, is there the same ex. Sort of view that all the infrastructure that was being used during the days when it was working profitably would need a significant amount of capital for an entity like Cargill or the sort of family of global food companies to want to reenter that business?

[Jeff Kazen]

Look, I am not a Venezuelan expert. Our business is actually in education and risk management around supply chains and we do a lot of work with us growers. So this was a bit of an accidental experience to, to, from, from what happened to bring me here today. We do know we were struggling to keep the plants maintained. These are. But there. And I'm sure there's a lot of work that has to be done. I think the number one thing you have to have is security, right. You have to be able. You're going to need some promises. There's a lot of companies that lost a lot of money in Venezuela, right, with the assets they had. Because the second you walk away from an asset there, try to even say mothball it, everything gets stolen. Okay. That you don't expect. There's. You walk into a plant that you shut down five years ago that there'll be anything there. You have to defend it at all times. Otherwise if somebody's going to go in there and you know, sell the parts in the black market and scrap the rest. Because scrap iron trades in dollars. And so you can't expect that there's. Unless the. Whatever it is is running, you can't expect much. And I know that they're. They were started as strange. Again, strange things that happen as the domestic situation got worse. They actually had to increase imports of finished goods because you couldn't finish them in the country anymore. But there was still demand. And you had remittances. Right. Same with like Mexico. Right. So there is some dollars floating even into people that stayed. I know, you know, we had some employees that talk about sending money to their families in Venezuela and Easier to do now, probably, but that was, you know, the Miami banking connection and some things like that. So I suspect that there's a tremendous amount of work, but I'm not an expert on the current situation. I think it can be done in the basic staples. Those plants are not that hard. Flour mills, oil refineries. Yeah, there's no doubt if the world put their mind to it. And I just saw we sold $300 million worth of oil here this morning. They went apparently to buy the currency. Remember we talked about currency stabilization? Apparently they must have used a lot of that to buy bolivars and create a more stable exchange so you can get the economy floating. So, you know, it hats off to the current administration for. Somebody's obviously paying attention. But yeah, it's going to take security, it's going to take some promises, stability. Because, you know, you're talking about putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the ground into a place where effectively those, those type of investments were lost. And I don't think that's going to be an easy sell to the multinational world.

[Tracy Alloway]

What was it like just moving stuff within Venezuela? Because you describe how an empty plant would. Would be gutted fairly quickly. I imagine if people saw an opportunity, you know, a truckload of something that could be valuable on the road, they probably seized on that as well.

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter. You know, Venezuela was, you know, we had security experts that worked for us that understood what they had to do on the ground to get shipments like say from the port to the plant or from the plant to. To a grocery store. Right. Or something like that, or some kind of distribution. Very. It's very difficult. My more recent. You think this doesn't go on in Mexico. You know, we were losing a lot of trucks. Sometimes we'd get the trucks back, sometimes we lost the cargo and the trucks. That still goes on Right today. And you sit there and try to understand what is the cost of doing business. Right. And you will lose some along the way. And sometimes you hire local companies that are more able to navigate how to get things moved from point A to point B. And you effectively have to work, work from inside your compound. You also have to secure from theft Right at the compound. Right. It's just all these drags on the economy when you get into these situations. Right. It's just dragging the entire country down in hyperinflation. I think if you studied in it, you know, Mike and I both have some economics degrees. There's all these dragging taxes on people. You know, your Employee gets paid today, and they just. As soon as they get paid, they run out and spend it that like, they're done for the rest of the day. Right. The shoe leather tax. Right. And. And, you know, now everything has to be secured with, you know, multi fences and barbed wire and constant guards and guards and trucks and all that stuff. And if you can remove that burden from the economy, it's just a huge, you know, you know, in boost to the economy. Mike and I are, you know, watching things in Argentina. I love going there. It's a beautiful place and highly recommend, but, you know, let's see how that goes, because it feels like the country is starting to lose some of those shackles.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Tracy, I just have a warning to you, by the way.

[Tracy Alloway]

To me specifically. Okay.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, you're not gonna like it. I've been watching the show Landman on cbs, and so when we do commodity episodes, I'm gonna make a start referencing a lot of things that I observe. But one of the themes is one of the plot lines very early on is the. Is the phenomenon of both trucks that disappear because the cartels still them, and then magically reappear a month later. And it's not worth asking any questions because then you have to get the FBI involved and then, et cetera. So the idea what Jeff was saying about the truck suddenly coming back is something that I'm familiar with because I'm.

[Tracy Alloway]

A viewer of tv, stood up by the television. I'm gonna steal myself for all the landmen.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, you're gonna get a lot. Especially when we do oil episodes. Mike, talk to us. Give us sort of your sense of Ukraine now and versus before the war. And obviously there's still wheat flowing out, but we've talked about the impairment, et cetera. What is the sort of scale of the impairment and the damage, et cetera, and what sort of levels are coming out of Ukraine and sort of give us your sense of where things are these days versus at the end of 2021.

[Jeff Kazen]

Sure.

[Mike Rolfson]

And again, I'm going to say something fairly similar to what Jeff is. I'm not as on the ground there, though. I'm very close with a lot of friends that are still farming at scale and trying to make whatever it is they're doing work. I would sort of start off with a theme. I'm sure you've heard that they're incredibly resilient people. They've been through similar things like this before, and perhaps not this generation, but certainly in the not too distant past, whether it be the holodomor and, you know, post Soviet situation and some of the starvation that came out of that, and then the World wars one and two. And so it isn't like it's that distant in their past. And they're figuring it out in a relatively simplified way. And I think that the two biggest changes as it pertains to the grain side is a simplification. So instead of some of the more complex to grow or expensive to grow crops like sunflowers and corn, they're pivoting more back to the basics of wheat and barley and things like that. When in doubt, put that out there and see if we can get at it in the spring. The human capital piece is an enormous problem right now. They, you know, just to find people that can be part of your work teams, whether it be driving the trucks or driving the combines and tractors, and are overseeing the grain elevator operations, is really, really hard. And then, as I alluded to earlier, some of the main horsepower export points have either been damaged or eliminated entirely or disrupted in terms of them being kind of grazed to where they're located relative to this, this current fighting front sort of where it's located. But they're limping along and, you know, I've been kind of surprised, to be honest with you, the total amount of grain that's been grown, it's just the mix has changed. The directions through which they're exported are changed, and certainly that, that ultimately changes the price that comes back to the producer there. So I'm sure they're not doing particularly well, but they're, you know, to their credit, they're still, they're still giving it.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

A hard swing just real quickly. So a thing I would like to learn today. What is it about wheat that makes it a sort of simpler crop to process and export than corn?

[Mike Rolfson]

Well, the seed is materially less expensive. The fertility required is materially less expensive per acre in their world, per hectare. The other thing that's just circumstantially supportive in that part of the world is the organic matter and the richness of the soil there is incredible. So you can kind of get away with it with lesser intensive agronomic crops like wheat to still eke out a pretty darn good crop. So that's the circumstance there. It's also fairly easy to recycle your wheat and utilize it as seed, where that's not as straightforward with other crops.

[Tracy Alloway]

I have one last question, and this is to both of you, but what would be your major piece of advice or message to a multinational company that's considering either, you know, maybe they're looking at Venezuela and going, there's an opportunity there, I want in. Or maybe they're thinking about post war Ukraine and expansion there. What would you tell those companies?

[Jeff Kazen]

Well, I mean, you have to have some expertise if you're going to go into these places. So if you don't have it with you, you need to find it and find people you trust. Security is going to be your number one part of it. Start, you know, start with a small business, right, to learn how things actually work. We used to start with feed mills. They're out. You can put up a kai smell relatively small, portable feed mills and start to learn how things actually work on the ground. We have hundreds of stories where we bought businesses, thought we knew what was going on even after we'd been there, only to find up on first day that, oh, you know, you weren't, you're supposed to pay a bribe to the meat inspector or something like that. So my advice is find a small business that you can run there with a reasonable investment and treat that as a learning curve or learn, you know, paying tuition before you jump in and make those big hard capital asset investments.

[Mike Rolfson]

Yeah, and Ukraine has slightly different context. I think the blueprint is there. If you look at the. I would kind of describe the glory days of the grain business in the late 90s when the infrastructure really got built back up in a way that served the global markets with a lot of value added processing, tremendous amount of investment that went through the aughts, you know, probably 050608 right around there. So the blueprint is there. I just think it's going to take, you know, resilient people, patients, attempting to maintain your teams there within the reality of the things that are going to be personal decisions for them, for their safety, for their family, for whatever. You're just going to have to go with that flow for the foreseeable future and see how this all plays out.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, Mike and Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. Odd lots. That was fascinating. We could go on for another hour or two or three and listen to all your stories of doing business in these places, but we're going to have to leave it there. So thank you so much.

[Jeff Kazen]

Yeah, thanks for having us on. Thank you, Joe.

[Tracy Alloway]

That was super interesting. Super interesting both from an agricultural perspective and then obviously Venezuelan and Ukrainian perspective. One thing that stood out to me was this idea of large companies, multinationals coming together when they enter a new market like that, because it becomes, becomes easier to operate, I guess, at the legal and cultural level that they're used to. That was really interesting.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yes, I hadn't thought about that at all. Right. So it's like global multinationals, even setting aside law, you know, they have certain norms you just sort of expect. And so someone from Nestle talks to someone from, I don't know, whatever, and they're like, oh, we'll have a shipment here at this time. And they can more or less expect that that entity will do that.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

And without too much translation or whatever. And so the idea that that is really important is something I hadn't thought of also on this, and it's something I've thought about even working, working at a large multinational ourselves is this way that like large companies are sort of, we call them multinationals, but they're also like nations unto themselves in this sense. Like think about the fact that when you move from New York to Abu Dhabi to Hong Kong and back to New York, that there is a team that facilitates all of these processes of like visas and stuff like that and so forth and like. And I thought about that when he described the phenomenon of the workers being more comfortable in the office than back home, that like the corporate office in this environment is like this like pocket of sort of, I guess you would say, developed world ease and comfort. Right. And that the moment you leave that office, you are out of that. Then you suddenly have to worry about electricity. Then you sort of have to worry about maybe running water and security and how big companies sort of create these security and legal environments within themselves that are these like cross border pockets. But that will be the same from one office to another, regardless of what country they're operating.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that I was thinking about was the currency question when it comes to Venezuela. I mean, you would assume with maybe this new relationship with the US access to dollars maybe will get a little bit easier. But it was fascinating to hear from Jeff just how creative they got when it came to securing dollars. So for instance, you know, trying to export wooden pallets in exchange for US currency and things like that. Basically bartering, right?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, it does sound like it basically comes down to bartering. Or like, here are some sacks of salt that can be used. And then you have this issue which is that you can have all of the talent in the country, although much of it's left in, in many of these cases. But you have all this talent and you have all this raw commodities, but you need a part and you need it from some advanced specialty maker of an industrial part for a refinery or whatever, and that's sold by a European multinational, and you need a hard currency for that. And so there is no getting around this fact that, like true self sufficiency is very rare. It almost doesn't exist anywhere in the world so long as any one component. And of course we know this is what China is trying to solve for. They want to have every aspect of the entire supply chain in house, such that there is no possibility of them not being able to access one part and grinding a whole industry to a halt.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. All right, we could go on.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

Shall we leave it there?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guests Jeff and Mike and their work at Agris Academy. At Agris Academy, follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at carmenarmon-ognit at Dashbot and Cale Brooks at Kalebrooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.comoddlots where the Daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord GG odd lots.

[Tracy Alloway]

And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about what it was really like to do business in places like Venezuela and Ukraine, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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[Joe Wiesenthal]

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[Mike Rolfson]

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[Joe Wiesenthal]

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[Mike Rolfson]

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