by Garda Ghista
World Prout Assembly
October 13, 2006

Continued from Part One

Innovation After Innovation

Dr. Yunus over the years became involved in many other projects. The central government asked him to take over failing fisheries and he did. He studied pisciculture, learned how to clean the ponds and make them productive with baby fish, and created one more success story. While most people know Dr. Yunus in reference to micro-credit loans, but he took other steps for the poor. For example, he insisted that 100 percent of all adult Grameen Bank members/villagers register to vote and that they vote in the general as well as local elections. He did not have to do this. But, his life from 1974 onwards was just a whirlpool of ideas just churning in his mind one after the other - new ways to uplift the poor. Nothing could give him more satisfaction than this.

In Bangladesh huge problems and obstacles are simply a part of the life. In 1991 a cyclone hit the southern region of Bangladesh at 2:00 in the morning and killed 110,000 people in just the one night. After recovering from the shock, many Grameen Bank members went out in boats looking for survivors. The bodies of the dead - people and animals - surrounded them in the water, along with remains of the houses. Nevertheless, the Grameen Bank staff and members are there in the villages when disaster strikes, helping in any way possible.

Another example of Muhammad Yunus' extraordinary vision combined with unbounded compassion and singular determination to make a poverty-free Bangladesh is the bank?s assistance in bigger and bigger projects (and hence loans) for the borrower/members. Yunus said: "We wanted to help them leave the poverty line so far behind that their young children would barely remember what it felt like to be born poor." Yunus together with his staff members created a new goal for Grameen Bank: it was to make every Grameen Bank member "poverty-free" in a specified period of time. How did they define "poverty-free?" To find out, they interviewed numerous borrowers and came up with the following set of ten indicators:

1. having a house with a tin roof
2. having beds or cots for all members of the family
3. having access to safe drinking water
4. having access to a sanitary latrine
5. having all school-age children attending school
6. having sufficient warm clothing for the winter
7. having mosquito nets
8. having a home vegetable garden
9. having no food shortages, even during the most difficult time of a very difficult year, and
10. having sufficient income-earning opportunities for all adult members of the family.[32]

Having established these goals for a poverty-free Bangladesh, Grameen Bank is monitoring the well-being of their borrowers and has invited outside agencies and international researchers to help them to determine the successes and setbacks of Grameen Bank in achieving this visionary and humane goal.

Muhammad Yunus by this time was keen to convey to other economists that micro-credit enterprise will be successful anywhere when driven by an attitude, which he called "social consciousness." It meant bringing a social dimension to economics - a human side. In his life Yunus saw that the free market does not give solutions to social problems. It does not help the poor and the elderly nor does it provide health care and education to the people. Despite this, Yunus believes that government should stay out of most things except for the justice system, national defense and foreign policy. Caring for the elderly and the poor, providing health care and education, can all be done in the private sector in the form of collective businesses or cooperatives, owned and run by the people to serve the people. Yunus further does not believe in the welfare system of providing unemployment checks to those without jobs. He says it destroys their dignity and their incentive. Economic structures create poverty. If the economic structure is changed, if it is Grameenized, if micro-loans are given to the poor, they will work hard, they will be creative, and they will pull themselves right out of unemployment, poverty and helplessness. They will lead lives of dignity. And, Yunus says, they don't need training. They need financial capital. He says, every human being is a potential entrepreneur. If we look upon every human being - even the beggar on the road - as a potential entrepreneur, we will change the whole economic structure. It would mean every person has a choice in whether to be an entrepreneur or a wage earner. In western countries entrepreneurs are taught to think of shareholder profit only, and never to think of societal benefit. This must change. Social values, social consciousness, must become an integral part of economics. Yunus does not support the public and private sector as they are defined today. Rather, he supports the creation of a new sector - the social-consciousness-driven private sector. He says that people can be driven by the desire to serve the social sector - the collective humanity - as much as greed drives capitalists today. According to Yunus, greed and corruption form partnerships quickly based on mutual self-interests. It is time to add social-consciousness as a third contestant in the marketplace!

Muhammad Yunus has ideas that completely differ from mainstream economists, for the simple reason that he rejects those ideas that do not benefit the poor, and he accepts his own ideas because they specifically benefit the poor. Critics say that micro-credit does not enhance the development of a country. Perhaps micro-credit does not raise a country's GDP. Yunus says that it does not matter. The sole criteria should be, does it benefit the poor? Development in his mind means changing the lives of the bottom 50 percent of the population. To put it more rigorously, he would say, it means changing the quality of life of the bottom 25 percent of the population. There is no reason also why micro-credit enterprises cannot grow and become big enterprises - so long as they remain owned by the people, following the economic structure of the cooperative. The crucial points, according to Yunus, are that the poor be able to realize their unutilized potential and that the social element, the collective social welfare be always a factor when making business decisions.

Muhammad Yunus talks very touchingly about what the future holds for the world. According to him, after 50 years, poverty must become a relic of the past. In his vision, there would not be a single poor person on earth. There would not be a single person unable to meet his or her basic needs. Yunus says that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. Rather poverty belongs in the museum. In future, he says, when children tour poverty museums with their teachers, they will be horrified to see the sufferings and indignities suffered by people in the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. The reason the problem of poverty continues is because the well-to-do, the politicians, just do not care. They claim that if the poor worked harder, they would not be poor. People need a level playing field. Free trade, says Yunus, must mean free trade for the weakest rather than "the strongest takes all." We need not just entrepreneurs looking solely to maximize profit. We need social entrepreneurs looking to maximize the well-being of the collective society. This means we need to do a lot of work towards building a society in which this value of serving the collective good is given top place. According to Dr. Yunus, 30,000 children die every day due to hunger and malnutrition. However, if the bottom 20 percent of the world population are given micro-credit, they can become wage earners and wage spenders.

There is Hope

On February 2-4, 1997, the first Microcredit Summit was held in Washington, D.C. 3,000 delegates from 137 countries attended. The stated goal of the summit was to reach 100 million of the poorest families by 2005. When Yunus stood up to speak, he told the delegates that the summit represented the end of a long era of financial apartheid, and that credit is a human right. He said the summit was about unleashing the potentialities of millions of poor people, and that it was a celebration of the success of millions of destitute women who had transformed their lives with micro-credit.[33] Yunus is adamant that poverty does not belong in the real word but in the museums.

Muhammad Yunus is a great personality for what he has achieved in life, for his work with the poor, but especially for his tremendous compassion and caring for those who suffer economically and his burning desire and determination to do something concrete to change the economic conditions of the poor people. He has a simple, clear and highly educated mind that he used to develop the micro-credit system for uplifting the poorest of the poor. This is his greatest legacy to Bangladesh and to the world. Essentially, Muhammad Yunus started a glorious trend, which is the business cooperative - first on a small scale, then also on a big scale. It is the cooperative business structure which can change not only the economic welfare of the people but also the culture and mentality of the people, moving the mindset from a self-centered individualistic one to a mindset that thinks first and foremost of the collective welfare of the society.

Cooperatives "combine the wealth and resources of many individuals and harness them in a united way. To - achieve this - cooperatives should be structured so that individual interest does not dominate collective interest."[34] In the cooperative system, the owners/members will make all decisions regarding when and to whom to sell, and at what price. The members/owners will be local people only. People of all and varying skills will be utilized with the expansion of cooperatives. During times of economic recession or depression, all members' labor and contribution will be accordingly reduced, so that no one suffers from the stigma of being without a job. This will also help the economy to pick up to a healthy level of activity. It is a clear example of the humaneness of the cooperative system as compared to the capitalist economic system where thousands or millions of people are laid off with the snap of a finger. It also contrasts sharply with the Marxist/commune system wherein the structure still entails a master-servant relationship, or supervisor and supervised system. There is no personal ownership which means the people will not work hard because morale will be low. What is the incentive to work hard?

The quintessential evil of capitalism is that (1) it denies the poor people any economic participation, (2) it is based on self-interest, selfishness and profit alone, (3) money is everything, human beings count for nothing, (4) competition is everything, the collective good has no value, and (5) it is undemocratic. On the other hand, the cooperative system (1) helps the weak and impoverished persons to grow, to become strong and self-sufficient, (2) is based on the collective interest and collective good, and not on profit. Hence the rendering of social service becomes prominent in the community, (3) Human beings have more value than money and profit, (4) Cooperatives provide economic stability because there is no stockpiling of unconsumed goods and no profit motive. And (5) It is democratic ? one man, one vote. Economy of the people, for the people, and by the people! According to esteemed economist, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, three factors are prerequisites for the success of cooperatives: morality, strong supervision, and the wholehearted acceptance of the masses. Wherever these three factors are present, the cooperatives will be successful. There is a huge amount of work to do to bring Bangladesh out of poverty. The work is multifarious in nature. However, Muhammad Yunus has made a vast contribution by educating the poor people regarding the benefits of cooperatives to their lives, and by caring enough to pull millions of women out of the depths of poverty and onto a higher rung of the ladder. Certainly he believes in economics for the people, by the people. He believes in cooperatives. In the words of Sarkar:

"The sweetest unifying factors are love and sympathy for humanity. The wonts of the human heart are joy, pleasure and beatitude. In the physical realm the best expression of this human sweetness is the cooperative system. The cooperative system is the best representation of the sweet nectar of humanity."[35]

Notes

1 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, New York: Public Affairs, 1999, p. vii.
2 Ibid, p. 203.
3 Ibid, p. 35.
4 Ibid, p. 39.
5 Ibid, p. 42.
6 Ibid, p. 57.
7 Ibid, p. 69.
8 Ibid, p. 72.
9 Ibid, p. 101.
10 Ibid, p. 135-136.
11 Ibid, p. 137.
12 Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank at a Glance, April 2004. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/GBGlance.htm
13 Ibid. .
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor, p. 145.
19 Ibid, p. 146.
20 Ibid, p. 147.
21 M. Yunus, Grameen Bank at a Glance, April, 2004.
22 Ibid,
23 Ibid, p. 130.
24 Ibid.
25 Mahfuz R. Chowdhury, Economic Exploitation of Bangladesh, New York, iUniverse, Inc., 2004.
26 http://www.sos-arsenic.net
27 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor, p. 141.
28 United Nations General Assembly; 53rd Session, The Role of Microcredit in the Eradication of Poverty (A/53/223, to August, 1998)
29 We can make the comparison of "poor" or "lower middle class" people in the US, who struggle month to month or paycheck to paycheck with a credit card debt burden of anywhere from $20-40,000.00. Yes, there is food and there is a car. But if the credit cards are removed, how many thousands or millions would be forced to declare bankruptcy? In Kentucky in the year 2000 the average credit card debt was $12,000. Today, four years later, after four years of George Bush cutbacks, the average credit card debt in the state of Kentucky is $23,000.
30 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor, p. 188.
31 Ibid, p. 188.
32 Ibid, p. 202.
33 Ibid, p. 259.
34 Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, Proutist Economics, Calcutta: Ananda Marga Publications, 1992.
35 Ibid.
___________________
Garda Ghista is author of The Gujarat Genocide: A Case Study in Fundamentalist Cleansing and President of the World Prout Assembly. She can be contacted at editor@worldproutassembly.org.