The Entrepreneurs That Offer Egypt Hope

While most Middle Eastern countries are trying to pull back from threatening each other with destruction, Egyptian entrepreneur Daoud Nicola is sending biogenetically produced potato seeds to Lebanon that will double the crop yield and enable Lebanon to sell potatoes economically to Saudi Arabia.

In another venture, his company, Danton Egypt, is increasing banana growth from 400 trees per acre to 1,000, an enormous leap in productivity--and in the potential supply of essential vitamins at reasonable cost to this large and populous country.

Some of Nicola’s ideas about the culture of potato genetic tissue came from the United States--from UC Davis and companies such as Plant Genetics of Davis. The techniques and know-how for the bananas came from Israel. All the ideas came through the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, headed by the farsighted Yussef Amin Wali, whose ministry enjoyed help in the 1980s from a small U.S. government program called the National Agriculture Research Project.

While the world worries about wars and capital shortages among the developing countries of this region, knowledge is leaping boundaries and borders and being implemented by entrepreneurs such as Nicola, who is only 33.

Nicola is extraordinary but not unique. The Middle East, historically a place of merchants and traders, is seeing a new kind of visionary business person these days--often influenced by education in the United States. This comes as Egypt and other nations reduce their state control of the economy and form closer working relationships with business.

One of the biggest businessmen in Egypt, Ibrahim Kamel, got his master’s and doctorate in business from the University of Michigan. He attended Michigan with some of the entrepreneurial Sultan brothers of Kuwait, who run banks and shopping centers and are beginning to experiment with poultry raising and agriculture.

Kamel’s company, Kato Aromatic, supplies 60% of the world’s jasmine, along with other fragrances for perfume, a traditional Egyptian industry. It also is in food processing, soaps and detergents, banking and tourism, and works with U.S. and French companies and even with ministries of the Soviet Union. At 50, Kamel has built a company with $130 million in sales that is a good bet to grow a lot larger as Egypt develops.

Nicola’s company does $6 million in sales at present but has five Ph.D.s among its 55 employees and boundless horizons. Nicola talks confidently of biogenetic agriculture that will allow the hot climates of Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq to greatly expand production of cheap food supplies within three to five years.

That’s not to say it will be easy--just that it’s possible.

Nicola, son of a now-retired head of the National Bank of Egypt, graduated in chemistry from the University of Cairo in 1980 and went into business representing a U.S. fertilizer company, Albion Laboratories of Salt Lake City.

It was a fortunate choice. Albion was not selling bulk fertilizers but special chemicals needed by Egypt’s soil, and it was doing research in the advancing science of plant nutrients. It was exposure to that field that led Nicola’s company to become Egyptian representative for Pioneer Hi-Bred International of Des Moines, Iowa, the world leader in productive hybrid corn seed.

Working with hybrid seed brought Nicola increasingly in contact with Agriculture Minister Wali, who has consistently advocated new approaches for Egypt’s agriculture. Egypt, which now imports food, is potentially a very productive country, capable of two and even three crops a year. But in its heat, crops are subject to diseases.

Wali saw from studies at UC Davis that biogenetic techniques can produce crops resistant to disease, and he encouraged research on Egyptian soil conditions. Early in the 1980s, he was backed in that research by $20 million in aid from the U.S. national agriculture program.

That’s small change in the $1.3-trillion U.S. federal budget, but it was a catalyst for Egypt. Today, the Egyptian ministry’s research attracts scholars from many nations, including Israel, with which there is a good relationship and exchange of ideas.

The ministry provided inspiration for Nicola, who traveled to California and to Europe to study biochemistry and plant genetics.

But getting the rights for his company to work with genetic technology was a challenge. U.S. companies told him “it would cost me $3 million to get the rights--$2 million for the right to the idea and $1 million for the equipment I would need,” Nicola says.

So Nicola’s company built its own lab for much less than $3 million and worked on potato tissue supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture. It also had help from the Center for Potato Research in Peru--another instance of knowledge flowing worldwide.

Danton Egypt has succeeded in eradicating viruses in a strain of potato, greatly increasing crop yield. And Nicola is shipping seeds to Lebanon to grow potatoes in a new venture there, essentially because a second growing site in Lebanon will save him enough on freight alone to ensure a profitable crop.

Nicola keeps an eye on profit. He’s a businessman, not a diplomat or politician or warrior. But it may be that entrepreneurs like him will help the Middle East in years to come as much as warriors have held it back.