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Watch our interview with the man behind this article and two export booms.
Thomas Kehler started his career teaching at a New England prep school, but he quickly grew tired of the stuffiness of the atmosphere, and resolved to “get as far away” as he possibly could. He landed in Uganda, right around the time a combination of civil war and a flood convinced the East African Railways to abandon a line, and to auction off an inn and a boat adjacent to it. Kehler was the only bidder. He started guiding fishing tours of Lake Albert, and came to know a young Joseph Nye - later a key architect of US foreign policy - and the two struck up a friendship on the water. Kehler taught Nye how to catch Nile perch, and Nye taught Kehler about development economics.
In the decades to follow, Kehler would go on to start two export industries from close to nothing. Between them, Colombian cut flowers and Chilean farmed salmon are now worth ~$9 billion a year and employ over 300,000 people.[1] On a combination of willpower and luck, he managed to solve one of the biggest open questions in development economics - how countries enter new industries, and capture the jobs that come with them - twice. But the welfare of the poorest people in the world shouldn’t be left up to luck, and certainly not to the hope that the combination of a flood and degrading economic prospects on the Congo-Ugandan border forces a boat auction. So the question we ask ourselves - and which we asked Kehler - is how can countries, industries, and entrepreneurs create their own luck?
Thomas & Lia Kehler at their home, August 2026
Over the last few decades, export booms have driven almost half of economic growth in the Global South.[2] The impacts of each new industry manifest in thickened supply chains, more functional bureaucracies, more skilled workforces, and - most crucially - in stable, high quality jobs. It’s on the back of these booms that hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty across Asia. In one of the most striking cases, Bangladesh’s garment industry employs a mostly female workforce of roughly four million, with measurable effects on female labor force participation, marriage ages, and years of schooling.[3]
Economists often discuss export booms in the language of miracles. And behind invocations of “ITRI”, “MITI” and other four-letter acronyms, there is a recognition that we perhaps have no idea how these happened. A common story, when people feel daring enough to offer one, is that governments create opportunities via industrial policy and heavy investments. Canonically, the South Korean government built a steel company, POSCO, and used that to subsidize entry into higher complexity goods for the chaebols (or family conglomerates) that still dominate the national economy today. And indeed, this seemed to have worked, as capable well-funded states repeatedly managed to start new industries and lift their populations out of poverty.
But the poorest countries lack the capabilities to make this happen, and certainly don’t enjoy the unprecedented financial and technical support that Korea received from the United States. And governments across the board tend to fare poorly at supplying the small-scale experimentation that these states can afford.
Where governments have failed, entrepreneurs like Thomas Kehler have found ways to start entire industries.[4] While the Indonesian government sank ~$2 billion into a failed national aircraft manufacturer, entrepreneurs grew a plywood industry from nothing to over $2 billion a year in exports. Bangladesh’s garment industry, likewise, came out of a single 1979 partnership between Korea’s Daewoo and Desh Garments, which sent 130 Bangladeshi workers to Korea to learn to make shirts. Upon returning home, many of them spun off competing firms, leading to an industry that now employs millions.[5] In many cases like Kehler’s, one or a few “anchor firms” showed the path to success and kickstarted a whole industry on its coattails.
But anchor firms do not arise naturally, and many things have to go right. In the case of Bangladesh’s garment industry, Daewoo was only interested in this partnership because of newly imposed limits impacting Korean textile exports. We wanted to know what it takes to make such firms happen, so we tracked down the one man who may know.
We spent an afternoon with Thomas Kehler last month to ask him. He’s a natural storyteller, though hesitant to ascribe his success to anything beyond luck. But between discussing the genetics of cranberry shrubs and going into business with (aviation pioneer) Charles Lindburgh’s son, he dropped two pieces of wisdom:
After graduate school, Kehler landed a job at a business incubator in Colombia in the late 1960s. His boss left on the first day to become mayor of Cali, and Kehler ended up with a stipend, an office, and a lack of official responsibilities. So he started looking for opportunities, and started asking why they wouldn’t work.
A photo from Kehler’s album. The temperate year-round climate meant that they could grow flowers under plastic sheeting and wooden structures, without needing glass greenhouses.
California’s flower growers were making a fortune despite only being able to grow for a part of the year. Kehler learned that Colombia’s Bogotá plateau had the altitude and climate to compete, and was just a short flight from Miami. Nobody was growing flowers there for export. He could not find a good reason why not.
In 1969 he and three others put up $100,000 between them, less than $1 million in today’s money, and founded Floramerica. The team of four covered the whole stack: David Cheever knew agronomy and had studied the plateau to know the technical details. Bill Mott led agribusiness projects with the Development and Resources Corporation, and had managed Nestle’s processed fruit and vegetable joint venture in Japan. Harmon Brown was a stockbroker turned farmer, whose California greenhouse had a TV mounted up top to ensure he never lost sight of the New York Stock Exchange. Mott brought the team together, and they started with a feasibility study. A year later, they had 150 employees. In three years, they had 400 workers and fifteen hectares under cultivation. The team deployed government-subsidized pre-export financing to leverage their money many times over, and the firm kept growing.[6]
They faced plenty of challenges as they grew, and with worse luck or a bit less gumption, they may have lost the firm. First, they ran into limits on air cargo: Avianca was flying ageing propeller planes with limited cargo capacity, so the team bought an airline. Aerocosta was a small carrier willing to take flowers, and it held the coveted rights to a US air route. In Kehler’s words, buying the airline was “not the best move”, and they sold out as soon as they could. Soon after, Avianca bought a jet cargo freighter, and space stopped being the problem. Operating in Colombia during the height of Escobar’s drug empire carried further risks. US customs officials were wary of any Colombian cargo, and began impaling flower crates with steel rods to check for drugs. The team set up their own import arm in Florida with an X-ray machine, and invited customs to scan every box instead.[7]
Avianca flew Douglas DC-3 and C-47 planes (similar to those pictured above). Floramerica’s needs quickly outgrew the capacity of these jets, and they purchased an airline. Photo from Wikimedia.
By the mid-80s, Floramerica was producing close to $50M in revenue (~$150M inflation-adjusted) and had created a whole industry around it.[8] But Thomas Kehler wasn’t content with just flowers, and he was ready to start all over again.
He went to Chile in the mid-1980s with the intention of exporting stone fruit and grapes, but the land prices indicated he was “about ten years too late”. He soon met someone from Fundación Chile, a government organization that had piloted a salmon business, from egg all the way to market, and showed that it could work. And based on that proof-of-concept, he pivoted.
Salmoamerica opened in 1987, with its own set of challenges. Bandits stole fish. Sea lions tore open the nets. A sea-water concession took five to six years and needed sign-off from the national fisheries service, the fisheries subsecretariat at the economy ministry and the Navy, plus an environmental impact study and a run of technical reviews. But Kehler persevered and pushed up the value chain where he could, producing smoked salmon for France, and employing hundreds in the process.
This is where his second piece of wisdom came in handy - timing turned out to be everything. Kehler could see that global salmon businesses were consolidating, and quickly sold Salmoamerica to Fjord Seafood in 2000. Fjord asked him to stay on and run its Chilean arm, so he folded in another company, tripled production in a single year to 32,000 tonnes, and ended up running an operation with around 1,450 employees.7
That afternoon with Kehler, he mentioned his luck several times. Meeting Nye. Running into the man from Fundación Chile. Getting out of the airline before it folded. When we asked him to name a time he had been unlucky, he could not think of one. We must admit we don’t believe him - he experimented tirelessly and created the conditions for his own luck. A few of his experiments worked out, and he didn’t dwell on those that didn’t.
But while Kehler constantly created his own opportunities, it was a government entity with $50 million to spend - Fundación Chile - that set up the initial hatcheries and derisked the business model behind his salmon business. This isn’t that different to what ITRI did for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, or what governments have done for a number of industries around the world. But doing this sort of industrial policy requires three things at once: political stability, deep pockets, and the ability to execute. Aid from the US and other allies didn’t hurt either. But the poorest countries in the world have governments that are often underfunded and unstable, and now find themselves alone in a world that no longer sees a responsibility towards them.
Somebody has to do what Fundación Chile did, in the places that lack a Fundación Chile. Somebody has to create the lucky coincidences that let entrepreneurs create industries. And if Kehler is to be believed, the work of doing so should be a “whole lot of fun”.
We’ll report back when we know.
Note: Exporters Without Borders - and this piece - are supported by the Africa Jobs Fund, who are creating high-productivity jobs at scale by backing world-class entrepreneurs to build businesses in export manufacturing and international labour mobility. Subscribe to their work here.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Lia & Thomas Kehler for sharing their time, their stories, and their wisdom. A special thanks as well to Mr. Bill Mott, whose equally illuminating adventures we were unable to fully cover in this piece.
Chilean salmon: SalmonChile reports more than 86,000 direct and indirect jobs (2025) and an export value of $6.55B (2026). Colombian cut flowers: USDA (2026) reports an export value of $2.4B and over 200,000 formal jobs - AsocolFlores (2026) puts formal employment above 240,000. The two employment counts use different definitions and are not strictly additive.
Rachel Heath and A. Mushfiq Mobarak, “Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi women,” Journal of Development Economics 115 (2015): 1–15.
Rhee and Belot, “Export Catalyst in Low-Income Countries”, World Bank, (1989).
BGMEA. The Daewoo–Desh partnership is documented in Rhee and Belot, “Export Catalyst in Low-Income Countries”, World Bank, (1989).
Interview with Thomas Kehler, June 2026. Floramerica’s founding and early growth are also documented in Mendez, “The Development of the Colombian Cut Flower Industry”, World Bank (1990).
Interview, as above, and Peter Keller, “Making Sense of the Chilean Salmon Industry: Economic Boom or Environmental Doom?”, Institute of Current World Affairs Letters PK-21, February 2002.
Mendez, “The Development of the Colombian Cut Flower Industry”, World Bank, 1990.
