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Yunus: Time to undo the wrong things

By Wang Xu and Wan Zhihong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-03 11:34

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, shrewd financial investors often say while trying to rake a fortune from the rebound after market crashes.

Muhammad Yunus, father of microfinance, appears to agree with the investment gurus as well. But rather than seeking to enrich himself, he reckons the ongoing financial storm as an opportunity to build a new framework for dealing with perennial problems like food, energy and environmental crises.

"We all agree this is the worst crisis, but I also see its as a tremendous opportunity," the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner said at the opening ceremony of the Global Think Tank Summit in Beijing yesterday. "This is a lifetime opportunity to undo the things we have done wrong."

Yunus said the world used to depend only on one kind of business, where the maximization of profit is the main objective. That means the demands of the poor are often ignored, he said.

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For example, he said the financial crisis is only one of the crises facing us today, such as the food crisis, energy crisis and social crisis. But the latter ones were given less attention after the financial crisis, which involves big bucks for the rich.

The World Bank said in April that the global crisis is pushing some 35 million people back into poverty and vulnerability in Europe and Central Asia, or about one-third of the people that had escaped from it over the last ten years.

"The poor guys are the victims of any crisis," he said. "I want to create a framework that gets rid of the crisis.

Yunus said it is necessary to redesign the financial system, as the current one failed to provide services to two thirds of the world's population, making the reduction of poverty even more difficult.

Once a professor of economics, Yunus set up the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, giving small loans to mainly poor women who can't qualify for traditional bank loans. The borrowers, ranging from farmers in rural areas to shopkeepers, artisans and street vendors in cities, could then use the money to make a living and come out of poverty.

Yunus said it is necessary to create a new kind of "social business", which characterizes selfishness, while the enterprises could help their technology to deal with the problems we are facing.

"Now is the best time, as nobody is going to defend the old system," he said.

The Global Think Tank Summit is organized by China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE), a non-governmental research and consulting organization created in this March.