Ben Kalhorn serves as Executive Vice President for Cantera Partners, LLC, a division of Burlington Capital International.  His primary focus is commodity monetization and market research.  Mr. Kalhorn has been active in executing commodity monetizations in Africa (South, East, and West), Asia (Central, South, and Southeast), and the Middle East.  Mr. Kalhorn is experienced in conducting both desktop and in-country analysis through meetings with local, regional, and international commodity buyers. He has been active in developing and writing commodity management plans and proposals for the USDA Food for Progress program.

Mr. Kalhorn is involved in the monetization process from start to finish developing monetization plans and commodity management sections for Cantera’s clients. He has developed over 50 commodity market analysis papers, monetization plans, and strategies. When it comes to executing the actual monetization, Mr. Kalhorn is the primary point of contact for both Cantera’s clients, USDA, and commodity buyers and traders. His collaborative and creative approach to monetization has led to some of Cantera’s most successful monetizations.  Mr. Kalhorn works closely with USDA representatives to find solutions to the nuances and unique challenges that come with monetization.

Prior to joining Cantera Partners, Ben worked as a financial analyst for America First Multifamily Investors, an investment division within Burlington Capital. Mr. Kalhorn’s received a bachelor’s degree in finance from Saint Louis University and a Master of Business Administration from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Mr. Williams has spent more than 20 years in international agriculture as a commodity broker, analyst, and market economist. He has extensive experience in leading commodity sales, managing freight and logistics, conducting program evaluations and market studies for agricultural cooperators, and directing monetization efforts for USDA’s Food for Progress. As a broker of U.S. agricultural products, Mr. Williams had several customers in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, he participated in two of the first post-monetization assessments that were initially mandated with the 2017 Food for Progress awards. This included the 2017 Honduras project. His work on that assessment consisted of two in-country visits, developing profiles of the key industry participants and buyers, conducting interviews with the participants and trade associations, gathering pricing information and shipment details from port officials in Honduras, as well as third party data resources, working to analyze the price data with the team’s econometrician, and producing several sections of the report. He also developed the market profiles for the 2017 Mozambique and Malawi projects as part of that impact study.

While at USDA, he oversaw the monetization of more than 1 million metric tons of bulk commodities, generating more than $430 million in project proceeds, and reviewed all of the post-monetization assessments covering the Food for Progress projects from 2017 through 2020. He also led efforts to improve the internal Market Analysis for Monetization (MAM) process and updated the guidance for the post-monetization assessment and revised the monetization handbook. Prior to USDA, Mr. Williams also undertook a number of market studies, program evaluations, and benchmark assessments for U.S. and foreign agricultural cooperators. In 2019, he completed an in-depth study of Togo and its potential to serve as point-of-entry and trade hub for U.S. soybean products on behalf of the American Soybean Association (ASA). That work involved a detailed study of Togo’s domestic soybean production and its poultry and aquaculture sectors. Mr. Williams has a master’s degree in international relations with a focus on energy and natural resource economics from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the HEC School of Management in Paris. He is fluent in Spanish.

Mr. Kabat joined Cantera in 2015 as an independent consultant. He has worked for commercial and non-profit companies and cooperatives in four continents. Mr. Kabat has extensive experience with commodity monetization planning, proposal writing, market analysis and research, and ultimately the execution of a successful monetization.  He has collaborated with USDA and USAID on programs including Food for Progress, McGovern Dole, LRP, and Title II. Mr. Kabat previously worked for Catholic Relief Services for 14 years throughout Africa and Asia. He holds and MBA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN.  Mr. Kabat is based in Bangkok, Thailand and maintains relationships with commodity buyers and importers throughout Africa and Asia.