Placing trust in the poor

By Renton de Alwis

Written in August 2010, when I was on a three month assignment in Bangkok, this column dealt with the issues faced by the poor and the focus is on farmers. The problem is not only with the systems we have in situ that are exploitative, but also with the very outlook the decision makers and the elite have on our poor. Although the references are dated, I thought it will present some food for thought on a Sunday, as it did me when I wrote it on a Saturday night ….

Comfort has its way of rubbing off you. After a hard workweek, I was sitting in a hotel room in Bangkok last Saturday watching television. My real intent was to see if I could get to watch the cricket final. I had no luck, and I later settled to being content with reading the live commentary on my notebook computer.

So many Khans

While switching channels on the TV, I came across an interview on BBC’s ‘Talking Movies’ with the Bollywood actor-filmmaker Aamir Khan. With so many Khans now on the Bolywood scene, and others claiming ‘My name is Khan’, I had to get his first name right. He is releasing his latest film ‘Peepli Live’ in the UK next month and this was a public relations stint he was on. In response to a question about the film being touted as a political satire about farmer's suicides in India, he quipped “Let’s get to what this film is really about. Not only in India, but in many other places around the world, our focus is all about the cities. While rural areas still have the majority of people living there, there is very little attention on their plight. This film is about them”.

How true. We only focus on what we see around us and what we know. Unlike India’s vast spans of the countryside, Sri Lanka is small. Yet, most of our focus still is on happenings around the city.

End to Victimisation

While my eyes were on the TV screen, rapid images of our own farmers with bountiful harvests, being victims of rice-mill owners and hoarders, ran across my mind. Television interviews of farmers on ‘News at Eight’ claiming they will have to commit suicide, if the price of paddy falls far below what it takes to grow them, ran parallel in the backdrop of my memory. This is in-spite of our government’s proactive policy to be self-sufficient, cause effective regional development and redistribute the fruits of growth.

Farmers respond well and do their all to grow more and the fertiliser subsidies help. But the problem is, when it comes to selling the produce. There is very little done proactively to break the might of the mill-owner cartels. We hear stories of regions where political patronage is behind the hoarders. If we are to keep our trust in the poor and if they are to be rewarded for the huge contribution they make, there must be an end to this gross injustice of not-so-productive middle persons making undue profit.

It is heartening that the might of the auction fixing mafia has been broken at the Port Authority with the intervention of the security forces. But still this is in the city. The rural auction fixing of paddy, during harvest time also needs to be fixed, and fixed fairly without fear or favour.

BOP Business

Switching channels further, I got to another interview. This time a larger than life figure I knew much about appeared on screen. On Japan’s NHK television an interesting discussion was on. The key person on the panel was Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, the man who champions the cause of the poor and calls for us to trust and invest in them. What luck it was for me. The same day, in two different scenarios two people in two polarised situations, discussing the same issues of the same people, the rural poor.    

The NHK discussion was on “The future and challenges of BOP business”. BOP meaning ‘Bottom or Base of the Pyramid’. Businesses that support the poorest of the poor, like the Grameen Bank and the Shakthidoi Yogurt business with Danone the French dairy products company in Bangladesh. Sumitomo Chemicals of Japan project manufacturing mosquito nets in Africa, as a business helping eradicate Malaria. Questions were raised and the pros and cons of programmes like Nestlé’s Milk District project helping farmers to raise cattle and buy their produce, Shakthi project of Unilever where door-door sales of consumables eliminate the need for middle persons keeping prices affordable while providing employment to rural youth and CEMEX Cement Manufacture’s ‘ Patromonio Hoy project in Mexico, engaging rural people in developing housing based on indigenous technology, came to my mind.  

Way Forward

In addition to Professor Yunus, the panel consisted of top level representatives of JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency), JBIC (Japan Bank for International Cooperation), and a French agency supporting BOP Businesses. The discussion focussed on how companies can be profitable and contribute to meeting social needs looking at the bottom of the pyramid of populations, where the market size is large. The earlier premise that companies should aim their sales at markets with purchasing power is negated here. The idea is to create purchasing power, by assisting communities to come out of the poverty trap. All members of the panel agreed that the BOP business model, done right will offer a way forward, to end global poverty through business driven solutions, away from the conventional corporate social responsibility or CSR models.

Beggars no more

Professor Yunus emphasised on the need for business people to have trust on the poor. He said that his Grameen Bank gave small but adequate loans to 18,000 beggars on the streets of Dhaka. Now, about 80 % of them are out of begging and have paid back their loans, emphasising that they were grateful for the opportunity they got to begin a trade or a business with the start-up funds. “People are poor not because they want to be poor, but because society has not given them the opportunities they need” he said.

No single solution

During the final session, he was asked the question as to where one should begin a BOP business and how certain one can be of its success. His answer was “Find a need among the poor and a process to meet it, begin the business and face situations as they arise”.  “There is no single solution. Solutions will emerge as you take on the activity. The important thing is to begin” he further said.

Some argue that BOP business to be an escape mechanism in sorting out the failure of the capitalist business model, while others insist it to be an innovation of its own, that will be a panacea allowing the world at large to get out of the poverty trap. Whatever that conceptual position is; like Professor Yunus says, ‘one can not go wrong, placing one’s trust in the poor’.  When there is only one way out of poverty, one can hardly go the wrong way.  

 

Pix credit: Google free image