What It's Like to Do Big Ag Business in Venezuela and Ukraine
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Trump administration says it wants to kick start private investment in Venezuela now that it's captured Maduro. And Ukraine is eventually going to need a massive rebuild. But what is it like for a big multinational to actually operate in these types of places? In this episode, we speak with Jeff Kazin and Mike Rohlfsen, the cofounders of agricultural consultancy AgrisAcademy and former long-time Cargill employees. Jeff previously ran Cargill's Venezuelan business and Mike was the company's first employee in another geopolitical hotspot: Ukraine. We talk about the challenges they faced in these two locations, including dollar shortages, corruption, and security threats, and their sometimes creative solutions to them.
Read more:
Venezuela Leader Pressed From All Sides Over Oil Industry Plans
Ukraine Says It Attacked Small Oil Refinery in Southern Russia
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| 0:00.0 | Markets move fast. |
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| 0:04.8 | a podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. |
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| 0:17.5 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, |
| 0:20.0 | Podcasts, Radio News. |
| 0:28.9 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:37.5 | And I'm Joe Wisenthal. |
| 0:38.9 | Joe, one of the big topics of discussion, there are a lot of topics of discussion nowadays, |
| 0:43.7 | but when it comes to the recent takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration's takeover of Venezuela. |
| 0:50.8 | I don't know how to describe it. |
| 0:54.0 | 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. |
| 1:09.7 | It's in shambles. Yeah. |
| 1:16.0 | So you hear things about, you know, ships that are rusting in the dock and pumps that don't work and whatever. |
| 1:17.4 | People talking about really creaky infrastructure and also just a bad environment for doing |
| 1:23.0 | business. |
| 1:24.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:24.3 | I mean, this is the thing. |
| 1:26.1 | 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. |
| 1:52.6 | This also happens to be the case in Greenland. It happens to be the case in Western Australia, which is a very well-run country, which is that assets in the ground are anywhere mean nothing without the sort of rule of law, refining, processing, shipping, infrastructure, et cetera. |
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