“Ports, Patios, And Lines In The Sand”
An evening interview with Freeholder Matt Marmaduke
NCWS Evening Edition – June 7, 2440, 18:02 MXC
Mexico City has spent the last twenty-four hours arguing about one man.
In the morning, he told a packed hall he would not “murder a state for a port.”
At night, he let a courtyard full of aunties bully him into Bill Withers under the shadow of Xinantécatl.
Is Matthew Marmaduke the architect of a softer kind of empire, or just a co-op kid who got too much money and keeps saying no to gunboats?
NCWS sat down with the Freeholder of Missouri for a focused conversation on the hard questions: force, corridors, ports, food leverage, and what happens when a man who already owns more silos than most countries touches the rest of the world’s maps.
What follows is an edited Q&A, in full.
On sovereignty and the use of force
Q: Outside CCA territory and the lands you personally control, under what circumstances, if any, would you authorize the use of armed force to protect a port, corridor, shuttle yard, or tether line that serves your exports?
Matt Marmaduke: Under the Covenant of Corporate Citizenship I have an obligation to defend my own people and my own property if they come under attack. You better believe I will do that without a second thought, no matter who comes for them.
If it is my enclave, my corridor, my shuttle yard, and my people are there under Covenant protection, I am responsible. If a foreign government decides to treat that as expendable, they are making a choice. They should not be surprised when I treat it as an act of war.
Outside that, it is simple. I am not the world’s port police. I am not sending anyone’s sons or daughters to die to defend someone else’s bad investment.
On ports, Memphis, and what happens after the silo
Q: When choosing between competing foreign ports that can all handle your volume, what criteria determine who gets traffic and who is bypassed, and how are those criteria communicated?
Marmaduke: You keep asking that as if I have twelve ports to play with. I do not.
Right now Memphis is the only foreign port I can reach with bulk grain. I truck and rail my grain to their export system, I deliver into their silos, and at that moment it stops being my grain. Legally, commercially, practically.
If I can route grain down to Ciudad Juárez at scale one day, the same rule will apply. I deliver to the warehouse or railhead, I get paid, and from that moment on it is someone else’s export book, not mine. People keep trying to treat me like a central bank deciding end users. That is not how bulk grain works.
What I can decide is whether I sell at all to a given buyer. I cannot decide where they sell after that. Anyone who tells you different either does not understand the business or is lying to you.
On corridors as enclaves
Q: For any overland corridor that crosses another sovereign state, what minimum governance structure do you require, and how do you handle dispute resolution if that state later changes its laws or government?
Marmaduke: My terms are straightforward. If I build a tethered rail line across someone else’s territory, that corridor is an extraterritorial enclave for the full term of the lease. We are talking about a hundred-year lease as a baseline, not a five-year experiment.
The original contract takes precedence. If a host state later passes laws that conflict with Covenant standards or with the safety envelope for that system, and then tries to apply them inside the enclave, that is not “regulation,” that is a legislative way of declaring war.
If you sign for a tether, you are not buying a toy. You are entering a century-long partnership with me and with the V’ren Trust. Do not sign it if you intend to play games.
On small states, leverage, and saying no
Q: In negotiations with small island or microstates that cannot match your capital, what real tools do they have to resist unfavorable terms, and what limits do you accept on your own leverage?
Marmaduke: Every country, big or small, has the right to decide whether my companies operate inside their borders at all. They also have the right to decide whether foreign entities can own businesses or infrastructure there. They hold all the cards at the front door.
All I can do is look at their rules and decide whether I am willing to play by them. If their land law or corporate law is a mess, I walk. If they want ninety-nine percent local ownership, fine, they can find a local investor. I am not forcing anyone.
People keep talking as if I am putting a gun to their head. I am not. They control admission. My only leverage is the same as theirs, I can say yes or no to a deal.
On labor standards abroad and the limits of control
Q: When your grain moves through foreign slaughterhouses, warehouses, and ports you do not own, what binding labor standards, if any, do you insist on, and how do you verify them across borders?
Marmaduke: We keep circling the same misunderstanding. My grain does not move through foreign slaughterhouses and warehouses under my control. It stops being mine at the Memphis silo gate. The only consignments they take are from Amazon loads destined for the interior. Amazon pays a small fortune to move anything north out of Memphis, which is exactly why most of their CCA inbound runs through Ames Depot instead.
Memphis does not take consignments from me. They buy. I deliver to their system, I get paid. Once that happens, the beef, the bread, and the noodles on the other side of the ocean have nothing to do with my contracts.
On meat it is even simpler. Memphis offers such a shockingly low price for meat, especially beef, that I do not bother selling it there. Most of my meat exports go to a processor in Ames or move under Amazon arrangements.
Everyone assumes I am secretly controlling foreign labor conditions because they need a villain for their story. The truth is dull. Where I do not own the facility, I have no leverage beyond choosing whether to sell into that system in the first place.
On environmental safeguards outside the CCA
Q: When you finance or co-finance grain corridors in fragile regions, what environmental thresholds must partner states write into law as a condition of your participation?
Marmaduke: I am a botanist by training. I care about water tables, soil loss, and climate more than most of the people tweeting about me.
When I send AgriSolutions to work on a project, I hold my own people and our partners to very high environmental standards. That is non-negotiable.
But let us be honest about the scale. I am not out there financing global grain corridors. The only overland corridor I am seriously talking about right now is across the Ten Tribes’ land, and that offer is for a mutual project. They know their rivers and their grass better than I do. I bring engineering, capital, and a long-term shipping problem. We write a contract that respects both.
If a country wants to mine its soil to dust, I cannot stop them by remote control. I can decide not to hook my system into theirs.
On data, translators, and who owns the voice stream
Q: For translator and logistics systems deployed in foreign clinics, ports, or ministries, who owns the data, and what restrictions exist on your ability to use it commercially?
Marmaduke: The language data belongs to the V’ren Trust and the technical arms that make those translators work. It is not mine. The models themselves are being opened up.
People keep imagining that buried inside that system is some magic commercial dataset. Ask T’mari sometime. We are talking about fifteen petabytes of voice data a day from the first million translator units alone. Ninety-nine percent of it is people arguing about dinner or asking where the bathroom is.
Could someone try to mine that for patterns? In theory, sure. In practice it is noise, and the governance of that data sits with the V’ren and with whatever legal framework the host country has, not with my grain contracts.
On the South Asian Confederacy, arms, and IP theft
Q: You have publicly refused to trade with the South Asian Confederacy because of its arms industry. What criteria would allow any arms-exporting state to regain eligibility as a partner, and what proof would you accept?
Marmaduke: I am not against exporting arms. I do business, directly or indirectly, with Chicago, Evergreen, Korea, and several European countries. Everyone needs to be able to defend themselves.
What I am against is exporting arms for the sole purpose of starting trouble and profiting from the fires. The SAC has a long history of that, and of doing it in places that killed people I loved.
On top of that, there are more than a hundred and twenty cases of IP theft against my companies alone, all ruled in my favor by international courts. No compensation, no change in behavior. I am not going to pretend we just need one more arbitration panel.
Short of a complete regime change and a track record that runs for decades without those abuses, they are not getting a second audition. And even then, I am not sure why I would bother. I was already rich before the V’ren arrived. I do not need their money.
On emergency food politics and “grain as leverage”
Q: In a foreign climate or conflict shock where your grain has become a major import share, who decides allocation between states when supply is short, and what protection do you recognize against using that moment as political leverage?
Marmaduke: Everyone keeps building scenarios where I am the villain in charge of their shelves. I am not.
Once I sell my grain into Memphis, it is their stock. They sell to their partners. If there is a climate shock, the allocation choices are made by the people who own the grain at that moment, not by a farmer in Missouri.
Let’s also be honest about scale. Chicago growers put more than sixty-two million metric tons of grain a year into their own systems for a population under ten million. They do not buy my grain. Memphis is my only bulk buyer outside my own lands right now. If I had another port, we would be having a different conversation. I do not.
If you are worried about foreign leverage, build your own storage, build your own redundancy, and do not depend on one route. That is true whether the exporter is me, Chicago, or anyone else.
On jurisdiction, courts, and expropriation
Q: In disputes with foreign governments over corridors, ports, or delivery failures, what courts or arbitration forums do you recognize, and when would you refuse to comply with an adverse ruling?
Marmaduke: The Marmaduke Freehold as a polity does not do commercial business outside the CCA. We maintain diplomatic missions with reciprocity. That is governed by the usual international law.
My personal companies that operate abroad follow the legal requirements of the countries and localities they are in. They sign contracts, they accept arbitration clauses, they pay taxes under those rules.
But there is a line. All of those companies operate under Covenant protection. A foreign government that decides to expropriate a warehouse, a lab, or a corridor that sits under that umbrella is not “adjusting policy.” They are breaking the Covenant.
At that point, I am not playing nice with white papers. I will act swiftly and decisively. I am not going to spell out the playbook in advance. Anyone thinking about crossing that line should assume I will treat it as an act of war.
On what “your people and property” actually means
Q: Under the Covenant you are obliged to defend your “own people and property.” Outside CCA territory, who exactly falls under that definition?
Marmaduke: Freehold citizens who go abroad do so under Freehold diplomatic immunity. There are not many of us, and most never go further than Columbia, but the principle stands.
My companies operate under de facto Covenant sovereignty, which includes the family members who accompany those citizens. By Covenant law I am not allowed to permanently shelter foreign nationals, but I can offer temporary protection as refugees while they apply for asylum.
We have precedents. There is a famous case from 2138 when Meta sheltered members of the Kim family and their retainers when North Korea collapsed. They used lethal force to keep people from storming the compound. As soon as the asylum seekers were evacuated, a reunified Korea ordered Meta out. That is the sort of pattern you can expect.
If someone tries that with one of my enclaves today, the diplomatic fallout will be severe, and the logistical fallout will be worse. A country that decides to pick a fight with the structure that feeds half its neighbors should think very carefully.
On IP, enforcement, and refusing to fight wars for patents
Q: You have more than 120 international IP rulings in your favor against entities in the SAC that have not been enforced. What changes to international arbitration or enforcement would you support so that rulings cannot simply be ignored?
Marmaduke: None that involve soldiers.
You cannot force a country to respect IP law if it does not want to. To really enforce those rulings you would have to tear the place down, install an international force, and keep it there. That means dead soldiers and a bill that never stops coming.
I want my IP respected, obviously. But I am not sending anyone to die for my patents. I would rather write the loss down and take my business elsewhere than turn that into a pretext for a war.
On food leverage and the Covenant
Q: Would you support adding explicit language to the Covenant that forbids firms from using food exports as a tool of political coercion, even if they are not obliged to export at all?
Marmaduke: That is not how the Covenant works.
The Covenant recognizes that our members have the right to work and do business under our own jurisdictional laws wherever we are admitted. Host countries have the right to tell us to leave entirely. What they do not have is the right to say, for example, “you can sell broadband here but not books,” or “grain here but not logistics there.”
That is why Amazon does not operate in some countries where other Covenant firms are welcome. It is also one of the reasons I do not do business in the SAC or in China. If you cannot live with the Covenant, you do not get its benefits. That is the trade.
Could we write poetic language about never using food for leverage? Sure. But at the end of the day, every exporter has the right to decide whether to sell. The real protection for smaller states is not in my charter, it is in their own diversification and their own stockpiles.
On the Ten Tribes and trust
Q: If the Ten Tribes agree to a tethered corridor across their territory, what guarantees would you accept that protect their food systems and land rights, and would you recognize any right on their part to suspend or nationalize the corridor in a future dispute?
Marmaduke: Any attempt to seize that corridor or nationalize it would be an act of war against both the Freehold and the V’ren Trust. That needs to be clear from the start.
I would not have made the offer to the Ten Tribes if I thought they were dishonorable. We have been neighbors and business partners for a long time. They know exactly what they are signing if we do this, and I know exactly whose land I would be crossing.
We would build in safeguards for their food systems and land rights because if their land fails, my corridor fails. That is simple self-interest. But we are not pretending they can wake up one day, pass a nationalization law, and walk off with a tether.
On transparency, margins, and what he actually wants
Q: You are unusually open about what Memphis and your own people pay for grain. Will you extend that transparency to publishing standard contract templates and margin ranges so that small states can benchmark their own negotiations?
Marmaduke: My contracts with my farmers already require me to publish what I am paid and what they are paid. That is baked into how we run the Freehold.
If I ever manage to get a second export outlet, you will see the same pattern. Standard terms, transparent margins. Not because I am a saint, but because that is how I keep trust at home.
People keep assuming I am doing all this to get rich. I was already one of the richest men on the planet before the V’ren landed in my pasture. What I want now is simple. I want my people to eat, I want my neighbors to have options besides war, and I want fewer kids growing up in the sort of world that killed my sister.
If that looks like empire to you, maybe the problem is not the guitar in Toluca. Maybe it is the maps you are used to looking at.
