“Foreign aid, capitalist style” by Nina Easton is in the November 21, 2011 issue of Fortune magazine and includes coverage of Tony Botchway, a member of TATT’s Global Farmer Network from West Africa.
Botchway is the principle of Bomarts Farm in Ghana and participated in TATT’s 2011 Global Farmer Roundtable. The event was held during the week of the World Food Prize Symposium this past October in Des Moines, Iowa.
Find the opening to the piece and link below:
Foreign aid, capitalist style
November 11, 2011
Poor countries that want money from the Millennium Challenge Corp. pledge to end corruption and embrace democracy. Can this little-known agency change the model for global aid?
By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large
FORTUNE — Dole Food Co. has been knocking on his door, but Tony Botchway wasn’t sure he wanted to cut a deal. Five years ago, this Ghanaian farmer could only dream of becoming a supplier to the world’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables. Now he’s producing 4,500 hectares of sweet pineapples and mangoes, and selling them for juicy profits (profits he wasn’t sure he wanted to share) to Spain and Switzerland. His Bomarts Farm has expansion plans that local banks are happy to finance. And he can afford to pay his nearly 750 workers above minimum wage, while providing lunch and free medical care. “We’re ready to compete with Costa Rican producers,” he told me as we stood in front of his new processing plant in central Ghana’s Nsorbi, just weeks before he ultimately decided to ink a deal with Dole (DOLE)…
Click here to read the full article.
Farmer-turned-entrepreneur Tony Botchway at his processing plant
