2025

Dear SunCulture Supporters,

In January 2011, Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square and brought down a government that had held power for thirty years. The proximate cause was political repression, but the accelerant was bread. Between 2010 and 2011, global grain prices jumped 30%. This was a catastrophe for a country where the average family spent more than half its income on food. Hosni Mubarak fell not because he ran a police state (he had done that for decades), but because he could no longer feed the people who tolerated it.

Egypt wasn’t an anomaly. Haiti’s government collapsed in 2008 after food riots engulfed the capital. Syria’s civil war, which has displaced more people than any conflict since World War II, was preceded by a five-year drought that destroyed harvests across the country’s agricultural heartland and drove hundreds of thousands of farming families into cities already under strain. Madagascar experienced a military-backed coup in 2009 triggered in part by rural unrest over food access. Between 2007 and 2008 alone, soaring food prices sparked violent riots in over forty countries.

Generals have understood this for centuries. Napoleon’s observation that an army marches on its stomach was logistics doctrine. Herbert Hoover used food relief after World War I as a deliberate instrument of American geopolitical influence, stabilizing governments across Central Europe and cementing United States relationships that would define the next century. The Soviet Union’s inability to feed its population ultimately brought down its entire system. Food has always been power. We just stopped talking about it that way.

Food security is not an agricultural issue. It is a national security issue. The world’s continued failure to treat it as such is one of the defining strategic miscalculations of our era. We’re now living through a stress test of that miscalculation.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 removed two of the world’s largest grain exporters from normal supply chains overnight. Ukraine and Russia together account for roughly a quarter to a third of global wheat exports. The immediate result was a spike in food prices that fell hardest on the countries least able to absorb it. The longer-term result is confirmation that food supply chains, like energy supply chains, can be weaponized.

The fertilizer picture is equally alarming. Russia and Belarus together supply roughly 40% of the world’s potash. China controls a significant share of phosphate exports. When these chokepoints tighten through sanctions, export bans, or deliberate restriction, the effect moves through global food systems within a single growing season. Dependence on geopolitically hostile suppliers for agricultural inputs is a security risk, not just an economic one.

The conflict that began in the Gulf in early 2026 is making the same case in real time. The Strait of Hormuz carries between 20 and 45 percent of the world’s key agricultural inputs. Within weeks of the conflict starting, global urea prices had jumped nearly 50 percent. The World Food Program warned that 45 million additional people could be pushed into acute hunger by mid-year. A smallholder farmer in Zambia, who buys fertilizer sourced from the Middle East, is now deciding whether she can afford to plant. She didn’t start this war. She has no vote in how it ends. But she will absorb its consequences in her yields, in her income, and potentially in whether she is forced to migrate.

What the world’s most sophisticated actors are already doing about this is less visible. A CIA analyst who worked on global food security put it plainly: “Whoever needs water and has guns is going to go get it.” China, which carries a generational memory of famine, has been quietly acquiring agricultural assets and supply chain positions across multiple continents. Gulf states that cannot grow food at home have been buying farmland and water rights abroad, including in the United States. In La Paz County, Arizona, Saudi-backed investors have been legally pumping water from local aquifers to grow hay, which is then shipped home to feed cattle. Arizona places no limits on how much water a landowner can extract. Local farmers are watching their wells run dry. The people doing the pumping are not acting irrationally. They’ve simply looked further ahead than the people making the rules.

Investigative journalists at the Center for Investigative Reporting spent seven years documenting this pattern across four continents. Their conclusion, that a quiet repositioning around food and water resources is already underway among state and state-linked actors, is consistent with what intelligence analysts have been telling governments for years.

And climate volatility is compounding all of this. Droughts, floods, and erratic rainfall have become more frequent and more severe across the Global South. The farmers most exposed are the ones with the least capacity to adapt: smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America with no irrigation infrastructure, no insurance, and no financial buffer. When a harvest fails, they don’t file an insurance claim. They stop eating, or they migrate.

The United States Intelligence Community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment is direct on this. It says that extreme weather is worsening the food security of low-income countries and driving migration, and the underlying conditions pushing people to leave remain largely unchanged regardless of what enforcement happens at borders.

In October 1973, OPEC cut off oil exports to the United States and Western Europe. Petrol stations ran dry, industrial economies seized up, and oil prices quadrupled in months. Before that moment, energy was treated primarily as a commodity, an economic input to be priced and traded. After it, energy was treated as a matter of national survival. Governments built strategic petroleum reserves, created energy ministries with security mandates, and fought wars and constructed entire foreign policy architectures around access to supply. The reclassification from commodity to strategic asset happened fast and has never been reversed.

Food security is undergoing the same shift now. It was previously treated as a humanitarian and agricultural concern, the domain of aid agencies and development banks. It is increasingly being treated the way energy has been treated since 1973, as something worth planning around at the highest levels of government, worth building alliances over, and worth fighting for. The United States has maintained bipartisan policy commitments to global food security through successive administrations precisely because the intelligence community has long understood food insecurity as a threat vector, not just a humanitarian concern. The countries and institutions that recognize this early will have an asymmetric advantage in shaping what comes after.

Africa is that asymmetric opportunity, and not only for the obvious reasons.

Africa is home to the world’s largest and fastest-growing forced displacement crisis. Sudan alone has over 14 million forcibly displaced people, more than any country on earth. Across the continent, the vast majority of those forced to flee have not yet left their own country or region. The displacement is largely contained, but it’s being accelerated by conflict, climate stress, and collapsing food systems. African displacement already affects the rest of the world, through migration pressure that reshapes the politics of every continent it reaches, and through food price shocks that originate in African production failures and land on kitchen tables in cities that have never heard of the Sahel.

In 2020, one in five people on the continent was undernourished. Africa imports more than $78 billion of food per year despite holding 60% of the world’s unused arable land. A continent with more uncultivated farmland than any other is paying to feed itself from abroad. The cause is straightforward: less than 4% of farmland in Sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated. Most smallholder farmers are dependent on rainfall in a climate that’s becoming less predictable every year.

When harvests fail and food becomes unaffordable, people migrate. The same Office of the Director of National Intelligence report that identifies food insecurity as a driver of migration also identifies migration as a driver of the political instability, border pressure, and radicalization pipelines that the intelligence community considers top-tier threats.

Al-Shabaab did not emerge from ideology alone. It grew in the specific geography where Somalia’s food system collapsed, the state lost its capacity to govern, and a generation of young men found that the most reliable path to feeding their families ran through an armed group rather than a farm. Boko Haram followed the same logic in the Lake Chad Basin, where shrinking water resources destroyed livelihoods across four countries simultaneously. ISIS affiliates across the Sahel are expanding into the precise zones where drought and displacement have created the ungoverned spaces that terrorist recruiters have always relied upon.

You do not defeat these groups militarily. You defeat them by removing the conditions that make a young man willing to join. That means land, water, a harvest, an income, and a reason to stay.

Solving African food insecurity does not just feed Africans. It reduces the conditions that produce Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and their successors. It reduces the number of people who have no choice but to move. It converts the world’s largest reservoir of agricultural potential from a source of instability into a source of supply. In African agriculture, governments worried about migration, defense ministries worried about terrorism, investors worried about food price volatility, and companies worried about supply chain resilience are all aligned.

The continent holds roughly 2.16 billion acres of arable land, more than the combined landmass of Europe and the Americas. It has the world’s most abundant solar resource. By 2050, one in four people on earth will be African, and half of all new entrants to the global workforce will come from Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’s agriculture sector accounts for 35% of the continent’s GDP and employs more people than any other sector. And yet credit to agriculture in Africa accounts for roughly 2% of total bank lending, a figure that has barely moved in a decade, even as the sector employs nearly half the labor force. The capital, land, and farmers exist. What does not exist is the financial and data infrastructure that connects them.

Luckily this is not a new kind of problem. It has been solved before, but not by financial institutions acting alone.

In the 1990s, Strive Masiyiwa, now one of Africa’s most consequential entrepreneurs, wanted to build a mobile network in Zimbabwe. The state monopoly said there was no market. The conventional wisdom was that rural Africans could not afford phones, and the infrastructure cost could not be justified. What followed was a five-year legal battle against the government, fought and won, followed by the construction of physical network infrastructure across some of the hardest operating environments on the continent, village by village, in places with no electricity, no roads, no existing service. The insight was not financial engineering. It was that the demand was real, the people were there, and the infrastructure did not yet exist. Econet Wireless grew into a pan-African empire. The investors who backed physical infrastructure builders like Strive, rather than waiting for financial intermediaries to solve the problem from the outside, captured the returns.

No bank created M-Pesa. A telecommunications company (telco) did, because it had the physical infrastructure, the customer relationships, and the operational presence to make it work. Financial institutions plugged into rails that someone else had built.

Agricultural physical and data infrastructure could be at the same inflection point today that telecommunications was thirty years ago. The conventional wisdom that smallholder farmers are too risky to finance, too fragmented to reach, and too poor to serve profitably is as wrong now as its equivalent was then. But the lesson is the same. This infrastructure cannot be built by financial institutions alone. A bank or a fund can provide capital. What it cannot do is build an observed data layer. It has no physical presence. No farmer relationship. No operational knowledge of what a good harvest looks like, what irrigation behavior predicts repayment, or how groundwater in a specific watershed is trending. That knowledge only comes from being on the ground, owning the asset, and collecting data directly over years and seasons.

The operators who build that physical and data infrastructure, who own the farmer relationship, the repayment history, the IoT telemetry, and the distribution network, will have built something whose value compounds the same way telecom infrastructure compounded. The financial institutions will follow once the rails exist.

We’re starting to understand that SunCulture is either already part of that data layer or will need to consolidate it. Thirteen years of observed data, irrigation behavior, repayment patterns, groundwater telemetry, and household demographics is not a byproduct of our business, it might be the most strategically valuable thing we have built. Every service we add closes another gap between inferred and observed, and moves another farmer from invisible to bankable.

The telco analogy holds here too. A mobile network was not just a phone call. It became the permanent infrastructure on which so many other things ran: payments, insurance, credit, and commerce. The handset was the entry point. The bundles were the business. The solar irrigation system is our permanent, long-lived asset. Access to input financing, agronomy advice, buyers for crops, health insurance, and weather insurance are the bundles.

The analogy has limits worth naming. A mobile network becomes more valuable to every user as more people join it because they can call each other. Our data platform doesn’t work that way yet. It becomes more valuable because it becomes the rails for farmers to get things and suppliers to sell things. Every transaction enriches the data layer.

Telcos have tried to build this before. They had the customer relationships, the mobile money rails, and in some cases tens of millions of registered users in rural areas. What they did not have was observed data. They could see that someone in a rural area received money in November and spent it in March and infer that they were probably a farmer. But they couldn’t verify what was growing on the plot, confirm a harvest, or see usage and repayment behavior on a productive agricultural asset. Inferred data, no matter how sophisticated the model built on top of it, does not cross the trust threshold commercial lending requires. To build the data layer that actually works, you have to own the operations. You have to be on the ground maintaining the asset, watching the farm, collecting the data directly. That’s not something a telco can do from a data center.

The geospatial, demographic, repayment, and behavioral data we collect across our customer network starts to function like a FICO score, the three-digit number American lenders use to determine creditworthiness in seconds. We’re building the information layer that allows capital and suppliers to find and reach a new consumer market.

In the past year we’ve moved deliberately in this direction. After our acquisition of a stake in iPOS (an agriculture retail point-of-sale and supplier financing business) and the launch of SunCulture Protect (our health insurance product), we launched a weather insurance bundle and made our first payout to farmers in Kenya following the October to December 2025 drought season. We launched Maarifa Connect, an offtake pilot connecting our customers to buyers of their crops. We’re about to launch Maarifa Plus, an agronomy advisory pilot. The carbon and lending special purpose vehicles we’re establishing will allow us to fund productive-use carbon projects and smallholder financing well beyond our own customer base, becoming finance and go-to-market infrastructure for the sector. And we’ve made access simpler. For just $15 a month, a farmer can now lease a SunCulture system and receive reliable water, health and weather insurance, installation, ongoing maintenance, and the ability to upgrade their system in the future.

The argument I’ve laid out isn’t new. Analysts, intelligence agencies, and development economists have been making versions of it for twenty years. What’s new is the pace at which events are confirming it. This month, a major international research panel published a report titled, “The New Geopolitics of Food,” the UK Foreign Secretary said the world is “sleepwalking into a global food crisis,” and the United Nations warned the world has six months to avert the worst food crisis in modern history. And these are not fringe voices. These are sitting governments and multilateral institutions saying, in public, what the intelligence community has known for years.

I understand that the world is loud right now. There are many crises competing for attention, and food security sits below the fold most days. The tendency among people with capital and influence is to wait for clarity before acting. But agricultural infrastructure does not work that way. The telco operators who waited for certainty before building in Africa did not build the next Econet. They watched someone else build it. The window to build foundational infrastructure is always narrower than it looks, and it always closes before consensus arrives.

One of our customers, Josephine Waweru, stood on the main stage at a TED conference last year and told her story to the world. Exhausted from carrying water up a hill to keep her small farm alive, she received a call that changed everything. Her talk was titled “The miraculous device that saved my farm and changed my life.” The question she left the room with was simple: how do we make this happen for every farmer?

That’s what we’re doing at SunCulture.

Samir Ibrahim, CEO