Michel Fribourg--Chairman, CEO, and Industry Leader
April 12, 2001
Michel Fribourg, Trader Who Opened Soviet Market,
Dies at
87
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
ichel
Fribourg, a Belgian-born American who negotiated groundbreaking
sales of wheat and rice to the Soviet Union in the 1960's and
1970's, died on Tuesday in New York. He was 87.
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| ichel Fribourg in 1997. |
During his five decades as chairman and chief executive of the
Continental Grain Company, he expanded the family-owned giant into
70 countries. Along with his work in opening markets to the Soviet
Union, he worked to build trade ties with China and other developing
countries.
"He was certainly the premier figure in world trade in food of
the 20th century," said Morton I. Sosland, a friend who served for
decades on the Continental Grain board and who publishes trade
magazines for the grain-based food industries.
Born in Antwerp in 1913, Mr. Fribourg was educated in France and
began working in the family's European operations.
With the onset of World War II and the invasion of France, the
family moved to the United States. Mr. Fribourg, working in the
company's London office at the time, diverted a freighter to Lisbon
to pick up family members and friends.
Mr. Fribourg joined them in New York and worked in the expanding
American operations. He became a citizen and served in the Army,
then became the fifth generation of Fribourgs to lead the company
after his father died in 1944.
The family-owned concern, now known as the ContiGroup Companies,
was founded in Belgium nearly 200 years ago and is one of the
largest privately held companies in the United States. Its
operations include poultry and pork production, cattle feeding, and
shrimp and salmon farming.
But it was grain trading that brought Mr. Fribourg his greatest
fame, and friends and family members said that trading seemed to be
encoded into his DNA.
After announcing the $80 million sale of United States wheat and
rice to the Soviet Union in 1964, Mr. Fribourg said: "Anybody can
get grain to sell to the Soviet Union. Our business is basically
built on ideas and imagination."
The deal, he said, showed that international trade could open
channels that diplomacy alone could not — and that trade could also
spur economic development in nations.
"He had a discipline in his business life; he had a discipline in
his personal life, which, in the crazy world we're living in, is
key," said Paul Fribourg, ContiGroup's chairman and one of Mr.
Fribourg's five children. The others are Robert, of New York;
Charles, of Geneva; and Nadine Newman and Caroline Rosen, both of
New York. He is also survived by his wife, Mary Ann, of New York;
two sisters, Renee Haas and Marcelle Zunz, both of Paris; and 13
grandchildren.
Although risk-taking and deal-cutting were part of his daily
life, "he was as quiet and as unassuming a man as you would ever
want to meet," Mr. Sosland said.
Paul Fribourg said that his father took pride in being a "grain
man" — a trader who could make commitments worth millions of dollars
over the telephone.
Mr. Fribourg was a founding director of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade
and Economic Council and the U.S.-China Business Council, and a
member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
His philanthropic work through the Fribourg Foundation and the
ContiGroup Foundation included support for social and educational
programs in French culture, the grain business and international
studies. He was also a contributor to New York Hospital-Cornell
Medical Center, New York University, McGill University and the
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, he
received the Commander of the Legion of Honor award from France.
In the years after he retired as chairman of Continental Grain in
1994, the company decided to sell its grain-trading operations — an
enormous shift away from its roots. As discussions of the sale of
the trading arm to Cargill evolved, Paul Fribourg and a team of
advisers flew to Switzerland, where his father was vacationing, to
present the company's options.
Mr. Sosland recalled that Mr. Fribourg, after listening to
debates over the company's direction, the uncertain state of the
grain market and the significance of leaving behind so much of his
family's heritage, asked only one question: "Morton, what about the
people? Will they be able to find jobs?"
When Mr. Sosland was able to convince him that there would be
ample work for talented traders, Mr. Fribourg gave his assent.
"It was never, for him, about making money," Paul Fribourg
recalled. "It was the people."
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