Soon after midnight in early January 1994, an Air Afrique cargo jet took off from the airport of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. It roared north over the sleeping city carrying 15 tons of première-qualité, extra-fine green beans bound for Paris. Within several hours, the beans would be unloaded and trucked to the sprawling wholesale docks of Rungis, on the outskirts of the French capital, and put up for sale to restaurant and supermarket buyers from throughout Europe. The jet's blast marked the first time in over a decade that a cargo flight had carried the region's garden produce overseas. It represented, perhaps, the opening of an isolated and stagnant economy, the linking of local producers to the global market. It was exactly the kind of ‘take-off’ the World Bank hoped for from this poor but deadly earnest country when it began a structural adjustment loan programme in Burkina Faso in 1991.

The months of negotiations and labour preceding this landmark flight, however, had hardly gone as smoothly as the lift-off from the darkened savannah runway. Indeed, the whole enterprise was so fraught with mishap that simply the arrival of that first shipment in Europe mattered more, especially to those who initiated the ‘green bean scheme’, than the fact that it made no money.