Thousands of migrants once fled the West African nation, but pineapple cultivation is helping put a stop to that. “I decided to return home if I survived,” he recalls. He did survive, thanks to a chance interception at a Libyan prison by officials of the International Organization for Migration a month later. These days, the 28-year-old runs his own pineapple plantation just outside Kindia, Guinea’s fourth-largest city. Aboubacar is among a growing number of Guineans who are part of an ambitious experiment to turn one of the world’s poorest nations into a major pineapple producer and reduce dangerous economic migration. Despite large bauxite and iron ore deposits, this tiny West African nation has an annual per capita gross domestic product of just $885. More than half of the country’s 12 million-strong population is under the age of 25, and that combination of youth and poverty has long fueled migration. In 2016, two years after the outbreak of an Ebola epidemic added another incentive to leave, 13,342 economic migrants from Guinea reached the shores of Italy. Only Nigeria and Eritrea sent more migrants to Italy that year. | 