Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 13 May 2026
The Strait of Hormuz crisis has dominated headlines through the lens of oil prices and naval confrontations. But buried in a warning issued this week by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu is a threat that could prove more consequential than $126 Brent crude: the global fertiliser supply is breaking down, and the next planting season is weeks away.
The connection is straightforward but underreported. The Persian Gulf region — Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman — accounts for a significant share of the world's urea and ammonia exports. Natural gas is both the feedstock and the energy source for nitrogen fertiliser production. When Hormuz tightens, it is not just crude tankers that slow down — it is the chemical building blocks of modern agriculture.
Qu Dongyu's language was unusually blunt for a UN agency head: "This is not only a geopolitical crisis, but also a disruption at the core of the global agri-food system." The FAO is now warning that fertiliser scarcity will lead to lower yields during the upcoming planting calendar in South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America — regions where farmers buy inputs season by season and have no strategic reserves.
This matters because the world already entered 2026 with tight grain stocks. The super El Niño that battered Asian harvests last year depleted buffers. Ukraine's export corridors remain fragile. And now the input side of the equation — the fertiliser that determines whether a rice paddy yields three tonnes per hectare or five — is under pressure from the same geopolitical chokepoint that is pushing up fuel costs.
The pattern echoes 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent potash and nitrogen prices spiralling, contributing to food crises in the Horn of Africa and Sri Lanka. But this time the disruption sits further upstream. In 2022, fertiliser was still being produced — it was just expensive. In 2026, physical supply through Hormuz is constrained. Vietnam's state oil company this week urged the US to allow an Iraqi crude tanker to slip past the naval blockade, calling the shipment "extremely important" to the economy — a sign that even mid-sized nations are scrambling for exemptions on an individual-cargo basis. If governments are begging for oil tanker exceptions, fertiliser vessels are unlikely to fare better.
The countries most exposed are those that import both fuel and fertiliser through Gulf routes: Bangladesh, the Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal. For smallholder farmers in these nations, a 40 percent fertiliser price spike does not mean lower margins — it means no planting at all. The cascading effects hit urban food prices six to nine months later, precisely the timeline that turns an input crisis into a political one.
No one on the front pages is talking about urea. They should be.
Source: Mercopress / FAO · 12 May 2026; South China Morning Post · 12 May 2026
Short term (now–3 months): Fertiliser spot prices on the NOLA and Baltic exchanges will spike as traders price in Hormuz disruption. Governments in South and Southeast Asia face immediate procurement decisions for the monsoon planting season beginning in June–July. Any delay in securing nitrogen inputs now will be irreversible — crops not planted on time cannot be replanted. Expect emergency tenders, bilateral fertiliser deals, and diplomatic scrambles resembling the oil-for-food negotiations of prior decades.
Medium term (3–12 months): If yields fall across Asia's rice belts and sub-Saharan Africa's maize zones, global grain prices will tighten by late 2026. Countries with strategic food reserves — China, India — will hoard. Countries without them — Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines — will face inflation that compounds the already elevated fuel costs. Political instability in food-import-dependent nations historically follows 12–18 months after input shocks. The 2008 and 2011 food price spikes preceded the Arab Spring; the 2022 spike contributed to Sri Lanka's collapse. The pattern is well-documented.
Long term (1–5 years): The Hormuz bottleneck is accelerating a structural shift already underway: the search for non-Gulf fertiliser supply chains. Green ammonia projects in Morocco, Australia, and Chile — powered by renewable electricity rather than Gulf natural gas — will attract emergency capital. Biological nitrogen fixation research, long a backwater of agricultural science, will gain funding urgency. The geopolitical lesson is the same one the energy sector learned from Russian gas dependence: single-chokepoint supply chains are a national security vulnerability, and the diversification that should have happened a decade ago will now happen under duress and at premium cost. Source: Mercopress / FAO · 12 May 2026; South China Morning Post · 12 May 2026 ---
Vietnam's state oil company PetroVietnam urged the United States to allow a supertanker carrying nearly two million barrels of Iraqi crude to pass through the American naval blockade outside the Persian Gulf. The very large crude carrier Agios Fanourios I, managed by a Greek firm, executed a mid-ocean U-turn at the edge of the blockade zone. Vietnam called the shipment "extremely important" to its economy. The episode illustrates how the Hormuz closure is creating a new geopolitics of cargo-by-cargo exemptions, where mid-sized nations must individually petition Washington for energy access — a dynamic that hands the US enormous leverage and breeds deep resentment simultaneously. Source: South China Morning Post · 12 May 2026
Thousands of Argentines marched in Buenos Aires and other cities to protest President Milei's continued defunding of public universities. Higher education has been one of Argentina's most prized institutions — free, open, and historically a ladder for the middle class. Milei views the system as bloated and ideological. The protests signal that his libertarian revolution has hit a nerve that goes beyond economic theory into national identity. The question is whether the streets can translate anger into political consequence, or whether Milei's legislative coalition holds firm. Source: Al Jazeera · 12 May 2026
Severe storms, heavy rain, and wind battered Cape Town and multiple South African provinces, flooding 26 informal settlements, damaging more than 10,000 structures, and affecting over 41,000 people. South Africa declared a national disaster. The destruction is concentrated in the informal housing zones where millions live without adequate drainage or building standards — a reminder that climate adaptation in the Global South is not about sea walls and carbon credits but about the basic infrastructure that protects the poorest residents of a city from a rainstorm. Source: Mail and Guardian · 12 May 2026
A devastating account from Sudan documents how rape is being systematically used as a weapon of war by armed factions — "to destroy the fabric of society and change its makeup," in the words of a UN special rapporteur. Women who have borne children of these assaults describe the impossible decision to raise them in communities that stigmatise both mother and child. The story is a stark reminder that Sudan's civil war, now well into its third year, continues to produce atrocities that receive a fraction of the attention given to conflicts elsewhere. Source: The Japan Times · 12 May 2026
Copper extended its rally above $14,000 per tonne, approaching the record high set earlier this year, as supply risks escalated from mine disruptions around the world. The tightening comes at a moment when electrification — EVs, grid buildouts, data centres — is driving structural demand growth. Copper is increasingly the bottleneck metal of the energy transition, and unlike lithium or nickel, there are no easy substitution pathways for it in wiring and power infrastructure. Source: Bloomberg · 12 May 2026
Jordan Bardella, the French far-right leader who reshaped the Rassemblement National's image into something closer to governing plausibility, has declared that his next priority is a reset of the Franco-German relationship — the axis that has defined European integration for seven decades. Bardella says he wants to work with Berlin and Rome on migration, defence, and industrial policy, framing himself not as a Eurosceptic wrecker but as a pragmatic nationalist willing to build coalitions. The move is strategically astute: it positions him as a statesman rather than a protest politician ahead of France's next electoral cycle. But the substance remains thin. Berlin's coalition has shown little appetite for engaging Marine Le Pen's protégé, and Bardella's migration proposals — the core of any such "reset" — remain fundamentally incompatible with Germany's constitutional framework. What matters is less whether the reset happens than the fact that Europe's far right is now fluent in the language of institutional cooperation. That fluency is new, and it is dangerous precisely because it sounds reasonable. Source: Politico Europe · 12 May 2026
India's Reserve Bank rule change is increasing pressure on Tata Sons — the unlisted holding company that sits atop the $400-billion Tata empire — to pursue an initial public offering. The RBI's revised regulations on upper-layer non-banking financial companies effectively require entities of Tata Sons' scale to either list or restructure. An IPO would be one of the largest in Indian history and would, for the first time, expose the famously opaque Tata trusts to public-market scrutiny and activist investor dynamics. Source: Nikkei Asia · 12 May 2026
South Africa's Hawks intercepted four Gauteng police officers attempting to steal 999 kilograms of cocaine that had arrived in Johannesburg from Brazil. The sheer scale of the seizure — nearly a tonne — and the fact that serving officers were the alleged thieves speaks to the depth of narco-corruption penetrating South African law enforcement. Brazil-to-South Africa has become one of the most active cocaine corridors in the world, with Johannesburg functioning as a redistribution hub for markets across southern and eastern Africa. Source: Mail and Guardian · 12 May 2026 ---
For years the climate debate has been haunted by a question that sounds simple but has been almost impossible to answer empirically: if you have a dollar to spend on reducing atmospheric carbon, should you put it into renewable energy or into carbon removal? Advocates on both sides have made their cases with models, projections, and passion. What has been missing is a rigorous, apples-to-apples comparison using the same economic framework, the same geography, and the same time horizon. A study published this week in Anthropocene Magazine has finally attempted exactly that — and the results are striking enough to reshape how policymakers think about climate investment for the rest of the decade.
The researchers ran a head-to-head analysis of returns on investment across the United States through 2050, comparing the carbon reduction achieved per dollar spent on deploying renewables — solar, wind, storage — against the carbon reduction per dollar spent on direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and enhanced weathering. The finding: renewables bested carbon removal in almost every scenario.
The margin was not close. In most regions and most modelled futures, a dollar invested in solar or wind deployment avoided roughly two to five times more atmospheric CO₂ than a dollar invested in the leading carbon removal technologies. The gap widened further when the researchers accounted for the energy penalty — the fact that most carbon capture processes themselves require significant energy inputs, which, unless powered by clean sources, partially offset the carbon removed.
This does not mean carbon removal is useless. The study was careful to note that in hard-to-abate sectors — cement, steel, long-haul aviation — removal technologies remain necessary because there is no renewable substitute for the chemical processes involved. And in scenarios where warming overshoots 1.5°C (increasingly likely), negative emissions will be essential to draw temperatures back down. The point is not that carbon removal should be abandoned but that it should not be funded at the expense of the renewables deployment that delivers far more climate benefit per unit of capital today.
The political implications are significant. Governments and corporations have increasingly leaned on carbon removal as a way to maintain fossil fuel production while appearing climate-responsible. The phrase "net zero" — as opposed to "real zero" — depends on the assumption that future removal will compensate for present emissions. This study puts a price tag on that assumption: it costs two to five times more to remove a tonne of CO₂ than to avoid emitting it in the first place.
Jan would have liked this because it replaces ideology with arithmetic. The climate conversation is saturated with tribal loyalties — renewables advocates versus carbon-capture enthusiasts, each convinced the other is a distraction. What this study offers is not a side in that debate but a measuring stick. And the measuring stick says: deploy the solar panels first, then worry about sucking carbon from the sky.
The researchers' closing line is quietly devastating: "In no modelled scenario did carbon removal represent a cost-effective substitute for emissions avoidance." In other words, there is no shortcut. There never was.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 12 May 2026
The British Museum has commissioned garden designer Andy Sturgeon to recreate the medieval woodland depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry — inside the museum's forecourt. The living installation translates the tapestry's embroidered oaks and hunting scenes into actual plantings, blurring the line between artefact and landscape architecture. It is a quietly radical gesture: bringing the outside world into one of the most interior-focused institutions on earth, and forcing visitors to experience a thousand-year-old textile through their senses rather than through glass. Source: Artnet News · 12 May 2026
Paris's legendary Bus Palladium — the Pigalle nightclub where Mick Jagger once played and the French rock scene gestated — has been reborn as Hôtel Bus Palladium. The five-storey reinvention by Studio KO, the Moroccan-based practice behind the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, retains the venue's hedonistic DNA while adding 30 rooms. The result, by early accounts, is neither nostalgic pastiche nor sterile boutique: it is a building that remembers what happened inside its walls and uses that memory as a design principle. Source: Wallpaper · 12 May 2026
Architect David Flack has opened the Hannah St Hotel in Melbourne, built on an impossible triangular block that most developers would have ignored. Rather than fighting the geometry, Flack embraced it — melding decades and styles into a property where corridors narrow unexpectedly and rooms have angles that defy right-angle assumptions. It is a love letter to the offbeat Melbourne suburb it occupies, and a reminder that architectural character often comes from constraints, not freedom. Source: Wallpaper · 12 May 2026
Eater reports that restaurants across New York — and increasingly beyond — are entering their "blue period." From Margot in Brooklyn, painted the saturated blue of a Prue Leith spectacle frame, to wine bars and tasting counters across the city, cobalt, cerulean, and navy are replacing the millennial pink and terracotta neutrals that dominated hospitality design for a decade. The shift tracks a broader cultural craving for depth and specificity over the safe warmth of earth tones. Blue signals confidence. It also signals risk — one shade wrong and the room feels clinical. That the industry is taking the risk says something. Source: Eater · 12 May 2026
An exhibition at Yad Vashem is displaying artworks created by Jewish prisoners inside the Łódź Ghetto during World War II. Before the Third Reich incarcerated 164,000 Jews there for slave labour, Łódź had a thriving Jewish cultural scene. The works — drawings, paintings, small sculptures — document both daily misery and acts of defiance through creativity. They are a testament to the idea that art is not a luxury that collapses under oppression but a necessity that becomes more urgent because of it. Source: The Times of Israel · 12 May 2026
Danish landscape studio SLA is designing Ookwemin Minising — "place of the black cherry trees" — a 98-acre car-free neighbourhood on an island in Toronto's Port Lands district. The project, which just received planning approval, is part of Toronto's waterfront redevelopment and is being billed as Canada's most ambitious experiment in post-car urban living. The name itself, drawn from the Anishinaabe language, signals an intention to build something rooted in place rather than imported from a European playbook. Source: Dezeen · 12 May 2026 ---
The US government's new Medicare ACCESS payment model may be the most consequential AI policy development of the year, and it has received almost no attention outside healthcare circles. The core problem it addresses: there is currently no governmental mechanism to reimburse an AI agent that monitors a patient between doctor visits, calls to check in, coordinates housing referrals, or ensures medication pickup. ACCESS creates that mechanism for the first time. This matters because the bottleneck for AI in healthcare has never been the technology — it has been the reimbursement architecture. Hospitals and clinics operate on fee-for-service or bundled payment models that pay for human encounters in specific settings. An AI system that prevents a hospitalisation by catching deterioration at home generates enormous value but has no billing code. ACCESS changes this by creating payment pathways for continuous, technology-mediated care — effectively acknowledging that the unit of healthcare is no longer the visit but the relationship. If ACCESS works, it will create the first large-scale market signal telling health-tech companies exactly what Medicare will pay for. That is the kind of demand-side clarity that turns pilot projects into industries. Source: TechCrunch · 12 May 2026
Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind spinout focused on using AI to design drugs, has raised $2.1 billion in what is one of the largest rounds ever for a biotech-AI company. The company, led by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabi, applies the same deep-learning architecture that solved protein structure prediction (AlphaFold) to the harder problem of drug design — predicting not just what a molecule looks like but how it will behave in a living system. The scale of the raise reflects investor conviction that AI-driven drug discovery is moving from proof-of-concept to pipeline. It also concentrates an extraordinary amount of capital and talent in a single entity at the intersection of two of the century's most important technologies. Source: Sifted · 12 May 2026
Something strange is happening in the AI stock frenzy: the Chinese companies that helped build the foundations of modern artificial intelligence are being left behind by the market. Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu — firms with world-class AI research labs, massive proprietary datasets, and billions of users — are watching their share prices stagnate while pure-play AI companies, many of them far smaller, capture investor imagination and capital. The disconnect is partly structural. Chinese big tech carries the weight of legacy businesses — e-commerce, gaming, cloud services — that investors now view as mature and margin-compressed. When analysts model Alibaba, they see logistics warehouses and regulatory risk; when they model a pure AI startup, they see unbounded optionality. The result is a valuation gap that has little to do with actual AI capability and everything to do with how markets price narrative versus complexity. But there is a deeper issue. Geopolitical risk has become a permanent discount on Chinese tech equities. US-China tensions, export controls on advanced chips, and the lingering shadow of Beijing's 2021 tech crackdown have made global fund managers structurally underweight Chinese AI — even as Chinese labs produce research that rivals anything coming out of San Francisco. The irony is acute: the Chinese engineers and researchers who fuelled Silicon Valley's AI boom for decades are now superstars in both countries, but the companies that employ them in China trade at a fraction of their American counterparts' multiples. The question for investors is whether this gap represents a mispricing that will eventually correct — or a permanent feature of a bifurcated technology world where capability and capital flow along geopolitical fault lines rather than meritocratic ones. Source: Financial Times · 12 May 2026; Rest of World · 12 May 2026 ---
11.6
$11.6 billion
That is how much Nigeria will spend on debt servicing in 2026, President Tinubu revealed this week while simultaneously lamenting that Africa accounts for just 2 percent of global manufacturing value added. The juxtaposition is brutal. Nigeria — Africa's largest economy, with 220 million people and the continent's biggest oil reserves — will transfer $11.6 billion to creditors this year. For context, that sum exceeds the entire annual GDP of roughly half the countries in Africa. It is more than Nigeria spends on health and education combined in most fiscal years.
The figure crystallises the debt trap facing resource-rich African nations: revenues from commodities flow out as debt service while domestic manufacturing — the only path to broad-based employment and economic complexity — remains starved of investment. Tinubu made his remarks at an investor event in Kenya, pitching Nigeria's "blue economy" potential. But investors sitting in that room would have done the arithmetic: a country spending $11.6 billion servicing debt is a country whose fiscal space for productive investment is close to zero.
The number also ties back to today's signal. When fertiliser prices spike because of Hormuz, Nigeria — an oil exporter that paradoxically imports most of its refined fuel and agricultural inputs — faces both higher costs and diminished capacity to subsidise farmers. Debt service crowds out the emergency spending that a fertiliser crisis demands. The $11.6 billion is not just a fiscal statistic. It is the weight that makes every subsequent shock heavier.
Source: Business Day Nigeria · 12 May 2026
In perspective
That is how much Nigeria will spend on debt servicing in 2026, President Tinubu revealed this week while simultaneously lamenting that Africa accounts for just 2 percent of global manufacturing value added. The juxtaposition is brutal. Nigeria — Africa's...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Nobody talks about fertilizer. Everyone should. This week the FAO warned that the real consequence of the Hormuz crisis isn't more expensive gasoline but that nitrogen and urea aren't reaching farmers in Bangladesh, Kenya and the Philippines before monsoon planting. And whoever misses the sowing window misses the entire harvest. There is no undo button in agriculture.
What's striking is how predictable this pattern is. We saw it in 2022 when Russian potash vanished from the market and Sri Lanka collapsed. We saw it in 2008 and 2011 when food prices triggered the Arab Spring. Every time we act surprised, as if the link between a geopolitical chokepoint and an empty plate were some kind of revelation. It isn't. It's a design flaw in a system we refuse to rebuild.
The solution exists and it isn't even particularly complicated. Green ammonia produced with renewable energy in Morocco, Australia, Chile. Biological nitrogen fixation. Diversified supply chains that don't hinge on a single strait. The technology exists. The capital exists. What's missing is the willingness to invest before the crisis forces our hand, instead of after.
I've been building companies for thirty years and the lesson is always the same: the one who builds redundancy when everything is calm survives when it isn't. The one who waits pays double. We know exactly what needs to be done with the world's fertilizer supply. That we're not doing it isn't ignorance. It's cowardice.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai