Those of us who practice journalism know that most of the time people we interview say pretty much what we expect them to say. (”Profits will rebound.” “We will win this election.”). A good source will feed you a pungent quote or some telling statistics, maybe tweak the theme a bit. If they didn’t, you could hardly meet deadlines. But now and again you find someone who is determined to be off-message,and they make it all worthwhile again.
Top experience in that category this week (well, one of top two) was a guy I’ll call Bill the Agrobusinessman. Here in Kiev the investment bankers (yes, there are investment bankers in Kiev folks!) are talking up the story of agricultural investment and revival now that global farm prices are, contrary to the pattern of the last two centuries or so, rapidly rising. (Is there nothing Bushonomics can’t achieve?) The fabled Breadbasket of Europe, as pre-1917 Ukraine was known, will return, in tandem with a new Biofuels Basket, because those funky Europeans make their ethanol out of rape seed (look it up in your farm dictionary), which grows perfectly, like wheat and soy and so many other things, in Ukraine’s beautiful black earth.
As it happens, I like this story (though my financial editor in New York appears unsold), so I shook the tree to find some real live agroinvestors, and one of the bankers steered me to Bill. When he mentioned the name, I recalled with pleasure that I had already met Bill in the mid-1990s. His story was this: A middle-aged farmer and grain dealer from the U.S. plains, the most bluff, straight-shooting, American guy you could possibly imagine, appealingly overweight in the John Madden style, by chance of fate meets a Ukrainian woman on some sort of exchange program in Des Moines, takes her for his second wife and vows to start a new life in Ukraine circa 1993 or so.
Two years later maybe, when I meet him, he is angrily disillusioned. He has brought capital, know-how, initiative, can-do attitude to a field where they are desperately needed, Ukraine’s endlessly downtrodden farm and village, and nobody gives a shit. More precisely, the local tin-pot lords of each particular farm or village understand Bill is a threat to their local tin-pot dictatorships, and vow to be rid of him at all costs: fire inspections, silo inspections, financial audits, when all these fail to deter him some outright vandalism. I meet him at his home base in Kiev and he is boiling with outrage. “We’re going to turn around and leave them here in their Communist shithouse!” he declares.
So fast-forward to 2008, and a banker is steering me to this same Bill as a pioneer of the bankable Ukraine farm revival. I call him and he’s still bluff and friendly, still working out of the same apartment office on one of the outlying Kiev hills. And I’m thinking he must have slogged through all the crap and made it, that he’s going to sell me a happy story of determination and Ukraine making progress in spite of itself.
Instead what I find is Bill older, fatter, and … angrier still. He starts off telling me: “Ukraine is missing a once in a millennium opportunity because they all have their heads up their asses.” (Two successive governments, though allegedly bitter ideological rivals, have both limited agricultural exports in the name of keeping prices low for Ukrainians, which hasn’t worked.) Then he gets warmed up.
When I note that something good must be happening because he is still here, he tells me that if he could get back the $50 million he invested he would leave tomorrow. When I ask whether all that money was his, he rises, bangs his chair on the floor (we were having an excellent lunch prepared in-house by one of his suitably self-effacing Ukrainian helper women) and shouts what the hell do I mean by that question? Isn’t he obligated to protect his investors’ money as if it were his own?
He recounts how a certain official demanded a bribe from one of his deputies as the price of importing a certain variety of seed corn. “If I were at that meeting, I would have taken down my pants and taken a crap right on his carpet, and you can quote me on that!” Probably I can’t unfortunately outside of this blog entry. I’m not sure where such a quote would fit into any piece I would write for traditional publication.
Bill stormed off to his office and I followed, though he hadn’t exactly asked me to. I spent 15 or 20 minutes calming him down, which I found I was rather good at. Either that or, as he explained, he had been on the verge of a diabetic episode not having eaten until 2:00 pm., and the sugars from the nutritious home-cooked lunch were restoring his chemistry. I told him that he had chosen to enter post-Soviet society from the back end, the demoralized, socially broken, post-purge, post-famine, post-all horrors imaginable and many unimaginable Ukrainian village, where change could only come generationally, as it had to the Children of Israel lost for 40 years in Sinai. (A common metaphor in this part of the world.) I bade him remember all the good work he had done, the folks he employs at good wages (relatively: $140 a month for the farmers), the young managers he has trained who will create more progress on their own in time. And he settled down, went for the photo album of his kids, grandkids and cattle.
I rather admired myself for my skill as a therapist. (You don’t want to die here, I told him. Use this hype about Ukrainian agricultural to sell out.) But I also realized one more of the many reasons why I will never be an entrepreneur myself: I lack Bill’s passion about anything bricks and mortar that could effect change in the world of karma. I’m always seeing things with perspective and on the other hand. Or maybe this is just an excuse for being lazy and risk-averse. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t leave him before he calmed down.
Tags: biofuels, corruption, ethanol, journalism, Kiev, multinational business, Ukraine
