From 2015 to 2018, as head of refined oils trading for the western hemisphere for Cargill, Jeff Kazin had the ‘bonus’ job of working on all commodities into Venezuela.
“I’m sure that other companies had similar experiences. Ours just happened to be in the food sector, which is just so dire,” he says.
He recently shared some of his recollections of the time on X in a post that has since garnered more than 2.5 million views and was reposted by Elon Musk.
My Venezuela experience as head of trading in the region for Cargill.
— Mike and Jeff show @AgrisAcademy (@AgrisAcademy) January 5, 2026
Cargill was/is the leading producer of critical staple ingredients such as flour, pasta, vegetable oil, and rice in VZ. I am not saying I agree with grabbing the dictator, but I did have a front row seat…
During that time, Cargill corporate security did not allow U.S. employees into Venezuela. Kazin’s in-country team worked out of the office located in Caracas, and then they’d regularly meet at various spots outside of the country.
“We were there relatively early. We had a team in the ground that was importing raw materials and processing those materials through refineries, through flour mills, pasta plants, rice mills, and those are basic staples,” he says.
The instability for the business came back to the government control of the currency and all trade. Kazin says all commerce had to be done in U.S. dollars, but the government allocated availability of dollars to companies.
“We had to get dollars from the government effectively to go out and source grains,” he says. “We brought a lot of U.S. wheat, U.S. vegetable oil, some Canadian Wheat into the country to be milled into flour and processed and it fed the population.”
This was further complicated by the depreciation of the Venezuelan currency, the Bolivar, and the ever-changing government control.
“It just continually diminished over time. So we worked to try to figure out how we could generate dollars in the country, and we tried a number of things,” he says. “And every time we would turn something, it would just get sabotaged by the government through some demand for bribery payments, something like that.”
He also recalls a rice mill being taken by the government—at gunpoint. The company was manufacturing parboiled rice when managers and employees were overtaken and the plant never ran again.
Kazin also shares the perspective of trying to start a feed business in the country to support livestock. However, corruption and theft undermined any efforts to raise animals as they could be easily stolen.
“If you grow a wheat crop, the second you harvest, somebody’s there to steal it. If you try to grow a chicken, you can’t lock the door tight enough--they have explosives,” he says. “Just the entire livestock industry collapsed.”
