Muhammad Yunus, left, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Mosammat
Taslima Begum, representing Mr. Yunus’s Grameen Bank, arriving for the
award ceremony at Oslo Town Hall today.
Published: December 10, 2006
OSLO, Dec. 10 — The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the
practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today
that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all
highway.
“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful
economies,†Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was
awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be
thrown off the highway.â€
While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in
addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate
grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good.
Challenging economic theories that he learned as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University,
in Nashville in the 1970s, he said glorification of the entrepreneurial
spirit has led to “one-dimensional human beings†motivated only by
profit.
Dr. Yunus, 66, then took a direct jibe at the United
States for its war on terror, telling about 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo’s
City Hall that recent American military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere
had diverted global resources and attention from a more pressing
project: halving worldwide poverty by 2015, as envisaged by the United Nations six years ago.
“Never
in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world
in one voice, one that specified time and size,†he said. “But then
came Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed
from the pursuit of this dream.â€
He said terrorism cannot be
defeated militarily and the concept of peace requires broadening.
“Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social,
political and economic way,†Dr. Yunus said.
He called for legal
recognition of a new category of corporation that would be neither
profit-maximizing nor nonprofit. It would be a “social business,†like
Grameen Bank, the Dhaka-based microcredit institution he started 30
years ago. The bank has lent nearly $6 billion to help some of the
poorest people on earth to start businesses, build shelters and go to
school.
Grameen Bank — with which Dr. Yunus shared the prize
today — is an interest-charging, profit-making business with more than
2,200 branches. But it is owned primarily by its poor clients and run
for their benefit. Similarly structured institutions, he said, could
bring health care, information technology, education and energy to the
poor without requiring infusions of aid.
“By defining
‘entrepreneur’ in a broader way, we can change the character of
capitalism radically and solve many of the unresolved social and
economic problems within the scope of the free market,†he said.
He
traveled to Oslo with nine of the bank’s board members. Four of them
are among Bangladesh’s nearly 300,000 “telephone ladies,†each of whom
once borrowed money to buy a mobile telephone and now earns money
charging rural villagers to use it.
Norwegian Nobel Committee
Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes called microcredit “a liberating force†for
women and Muslims, many of whom have traditionally shunned
interest-charging institutions.
“All too often, we speak
one-sidedly about how much the Muslim part of the world has to learn
from the West,†said Prof. Danbolt Mjoes. “Where microcredit is
concerned, the opposite is true: the West has learned from Yunus, from
Bangladesh, and from the Muslim part of the world.â€
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