AFRICA : As Soldiers Pull Out, Hopeful Capitalist Lands in Somalia

The first sign of real hope for this nation’s war-ruined economy arrived in a heavily armed van at the Hotel Sahafi last week wearing an Australian bush hat and a pocketful of promise: Greg Clutton was here to buy bananas--millions of them.

To do it, he had left his home base in the United Arab Emirates the day before, flown a circuitous, 14-hour route to the Horn of Africa through Djibouti and barreled through the final dangerous mile from the Mogadishu airport to his hotel with guns bristling from a battered old Toyota Land Cruiser.

But for the tough Australian businessman and his American employer--indeed, for scores of Somali banana farmers--the journey to hell was well worth it.

Clutton’s goal: to carve a lucrative new export market out of one of the world’s most-devastated war zones on behalf of the Dole Corp. And, working through a newly formed subsidiary, the Somali Banana Co., Clutton’s plan is revolutionary on two fronts.

The 300,000 boxes of bananas he intends to buy and export from Somalia each month for the next three months--the first such exports in nearly three years--will pour $2 million in hard currency into an economy starved by two years of civil war and 15 months of sometimes-bloody U.N. military intervention.

“It’s initiating the rebirth of their economy,” Clutton said.

If successful, the plan will also stand as a small, though symbolic, rebirth for the Clinton Administration’s policy in Somalia.

From the jaws of what many see as a U.S. political retreat from the military muddle in Somalia, Dole’s banana deal represents a potential economic victory for the Administration--the first time its use of military might overseas could net profits for U.S. business abroad.

Although clearly inadvertent, Clutton said the U.S. military intervention in Somalia--which will end Friday when the last U.S. soldier leaves for home--served to open the country’s vast supply of banana exports for the first time in decades.

Traditionally, Somalia’s crop was controlled by Italy, its former colonial ruler. But in the chaotic aftermath of the war and foreign intervention here, the market is now up for grabs.

In a well-armed, deeply divided land still without government or rule of law, the banana deal is, of course, only a small beginning.

Even Clutton conceded that the 50 or so farmers he has signed on for exports to the Middle East will hardly revolutionize the Somali economy.

In the end, most economic analysts in Somalia concluded, it will take investment by Somalis themselves and a Somali solution that reunites warring clans into a cohesive government to rebuild an economy that now has no banks, secure distribution routes and little available capital.

Musa Mohamed Afrah, a young Somali economist and entrepreneur, said he and his family are living examples of the challenge ahead. Afrah is among the handful of Somalis who recently returned from exile seeking profit and a hand in national reconstruction.

But the only customer with capital is the U.N. peacekeeping operation, which the United States is leaving behind.

So Afrah organized a trucking company that united scores of unemployed truckers into a cooperative that hauls U.N. supplies from the seaport to its military camps throughout the capital and countryside.

“The only source of income in the country right now is the U.N.,” Afrah said. “Those Somalis who have contact with the U.N. are very, very few, but they spread it through their families. And this is how the Somalis are surviving.

“But this is an artificial economy,” he said. “Most of the Somali capital is still abroad.”

Even Clutton conceded, as he raced off last week to the countryside in a mini-convoy of armed jeeps to seek out more farmers and inspect the crop, that his work is only a small start for an economy as ruined as the landscape.

“But if this works, who knows?” he asked. “It’s like everything else here. When you’ve gotten yourself back to nothing, you’ve got to start somewhere with something, no matter how small.”