Muhammad Yunus cites capitalism as potential tool to combat world poverty; 60 locals travel to Minnesota to attend 2008 forum
By Stephanie Johnson
Social business, women’s education and grassroots level sustainable aid—three remedies that have succeeded in combating world poverty. At the 20th annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum on March 7-8, at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., guests listened to speakers Muhammad Yunus, Greg Mortenson and others to understand what individuals can do to at the community level to combat poverty and restore peace in the world.
Under the forum’s theme, “Striving for Peace: Investing in Community,” 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and professor Yunus spoke of how the principles of capitalism can be put to work to help the world’s poor. His social business theory prompted him to found Grameen Bank in 1983, a micro-lending institution designed to provide low-cost loans to the poor.
“There’s only one concept of business: Business to make a profit,” Yunus said. “Poverty is created by the system we’ve built, the institutions, the businesses. I feel that the people that built this theory have a one-dimensional view of human beings.”
From its 2,400 branches worldwide, including one located on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Grameen Bank lends to more than six million people, 97 percent of whom are women. Yunus noticed that lending to women benefited families more than when men borrowed the money.
“Women have a longer vision,” he said. “My story is about how much the whole world is deprived because women are left out.”
Mortenson, New York Times best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, shares Yunus’s opinion that women’s education is a critical step in ending world poverty.
“If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community,” he said. “Every single child on this planet should have the opportunity, the privilege, to have an education.”
In an effort that began with a single school, Mortenson built more than 60 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, providing more than 25,000 children, including 14,000 girls, a place to learn. The Taliban, however, has destroyed several schools and even killed female students in opposition to women’s education. “I think their greatest fear is not the bullet, but the pen,” Mortenson said.
He also believes that educating women will reduce terrorism because, in Islamic culture, mothers must approve their son’s commitment to jihad. “A woman who has an education is much less likely to endorse her son resorting to violence,” he said.
Augustana’s contribution to the forum included assistant professor of philosophy Stephen Minister’s seminar, “Development and the Human Good: Beyond Economics.” Minister’s interactive seminar discussed the many forms of poverty beyond the realm of economics. He believes that measuring a country’s development by gross national product (GNP) per capita and other economic factors neglects personal development.
“This isn’t to deny that economic development is important,” Minister said. “But it doesn’t quite seem to be the whole story.”
Minister encouraged his audience to consider what goods development efforts aim to achieve other than economically. Especially important is what goods are required for freedom and what should be done if aiding a culture’s self-determination means promoting the exclusion of certain individuals, particularly women.
“It’s important that these goods be relevant to the cultures in which they are intended,” Minister said. “There isn’t just one economic problem—there are many ways people can be impoverished. If projects are measured only in terms of economic growth, we miss out on seeing other growths.”
Augustana also contributed to the forum through Peace Scholars juniors Kara Kingma and Clarissa Thompson, and through the representation of the Augustana Coalition for Social Justice (ACSJ) at the International Peace Fair, which is designed to help guests learn more about the practical applications of the forum’s message.
According to marketing and communications staff member Brad Heegel, 60 students, faculty and Sioux Falls community members attended the forum. Sophomore attendee Beth Singleton believes the forum offered insight into the intricacies of world poverty and the challenges of overcoming it.
“To help improve a third world country, we can’t just go in and give them food. We need to help them by teaching them how to do it on their own,” she said. “It’s a really good reminder that it’s good to dream big.”
Economics professor Reynold Nesiba has mixed feelings about Yunus’s message. “Muhammad Yunus seems to have an awful lot of faith in markets and very little faith in government and civil society,” Nesiba said. “His proposal for social business seems like an encroachment of markets in what has traditionally been the domain of government.”
Other highlights of the forum included an interview with Columbia University professor of health policy and management Jeffrey Sachs via satellite, an interfaith worship and a debate-style conversation between Yunus, professor Ole Mjøs of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Mjøs brought warm greetings from the Nobel Institute to the five Lutheran colleges sponsoring the forum: Augsburg (Minneapolis, Minn), Luther (Decoarah, Iowa), St. Olaf (Northfield, Minn), Concordia and Augustana. “We don’t collaborate with everybody—we are highly selective,” Mjøs said. “And so we collaborate with you.”
Next year’s Nobel Peace Prize Forum will be March 6-7, at St. Olaf College, featuring 2007 Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore.
Global Health
Women's Rights, Healthy Planet Go Hand-in-Hand
Talk of the Nation, May 30, 2008 · How do population, natural resources and women's rights all intersect? Robert Engelman explains in a new book how allowing women to control their reproduction can lead to a more sustainable planet. He argues that personal issues such as the availability of contraception are inextricably tied to much larger issues ... such as climate change.
Engelman says that he doesn't like to use the word overpopulation — "with its implication that some of us already here should not be" — but, he writes, "the reality remains that what most people call overpopulation is more evident, in more places, than ever."
Engelman talks with guest host Richard Harris about population and reproduction through the ages and its connection to environmental issues past and present. Engelman's book is titled More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.
Excerpt: 'More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want '
by Robert Engelman
NPR.org, May 29, 2008 · Chapter 1
Some travelers call the southwestern corner of Uganda the Switzerland of Africa, but the quaint tourist name belies the rugged landscape's hazards. Just outside the thickly forested Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, where half the world's last few hundred mountain gorillas cling to survival, farmers work their crops so far up the steep hillsides that sometimes, I learned when I visited some years ago, they hurt themselves falling off their fields.
Farmers in the world's poorer countries don't cultivate hazardous hillsides and farm at an angle because they can, but because they have to. They need every inch of arable land to support themselves. And their children often face equally dismal prospects in finding housing in the crowded cities where half of humanity now lives. These farmers and their families are suffering the consequences of, for lack of a better word, overpopulation. It's not a term used much these days and I don't especially care for it myself, with its implication that some of us already here should not be. But the reality remains that what most people call overpopulation is more evident, in more places, than ever.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently urged his fellow New Yorkers to "face up to the fact" that overcrowding undermines environmental stability. Members of Rwanda's nearly half-female parliament considered a national drive to achieve three-child families in the land-short African country, in the hopes that slower growth might prevent a repeat of its genocidal 1994 civil war. China, its 1.3 billion people clambering up the lower rungs of the consumption ladder, reached to Brazil for livestock feed, to the west coast of Africa for fish, and to Ethiopia for oil, where nine Chinese oil workers were killed by Somali insurgents. And as for the gorillas of Bwindi, they are far from the only apes that may miss the train to the twenty-second century. The 373,000 human babies born on the day you read these words will outnumber all the world's existing gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, our closest animal relatives.
The most-covered story in the "population news" category, however, is one in which population received few mentions: final public acceptance that by using the atmosphere as a dump for waste gases, human beings are heating up the planet. Even as we have awakened to the scientific reality that human-induced climate change is real and happening now, we still pull up the covers and roll over in bed at the thought that this has any important connection to how many of us there are. In April 2007, Time magazine offered "51 things we can do to save the environment"; not one had anything to do with population. A report from the environmental group U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) called The Carbon Boom detailed state by state the rising emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from 1990 to 2004 in the United States. The word population did not appear in the report, even though the country's carbon dioxide emissions grew a hair less than did its population over the period, 18 versus 18.1 percent. As I neared completion of this book, serious talk began about the need to slash global and U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide by up to 80 percent within decades—with no discussions of how different population scenarios will affect our chances for achieving such a staggeringly challenging objective.
Why so much silence on something so firmly entrenched in the foundations of the environmental economic, and social challenges the world faces? Some resistance stems from the "impersonal reduction of humans to quantity," in the words of English historical demographer Peter Biller. Who wants to be reduced to a number, or go out for a beer with one? Partly, population is just a sensitive topic. Any discussion of population growth quickly taps into an edgy confusion of feelings most of us harbor about contraception and abortion, about childbearing and family size, gender relations, immigration, race and ethnicity, and—not least—the intense longing, the pleasure, and the risks we can't avoid as sexual beings. Sexual taboos are getting harder to confront as a wave of religious fundamentalism grows in apparent response to the same chaotic global complexity to which population growth itself contributes.
Many doubt that we need to worry about population growth at all. Humanity has been growing steadily for centuries. For most people life gets longer and better, with tastier and more nutritious food, improved health, more affluence, and lots of cool gadgets and amusements. If population growth is a bomb, some have suggested, it seems to be a dud. Indeed, so dramatic have been the changes in childbearing in recent years, with the spread of effective modern contraception—supplemented in many countries by safe and legal abortion services—that the worry has shifted to countries like Japan and many in Europe where population has begun to ebb, or to nations that will need to draw many more immigrants to avoid imminent demographic decline.
It's almost amusing to see this new phase of "population crisis" based not on growth but on decline. The likelihood of future decreases in population drives far more writing, broadcasting, and blogging than does population growth, despite the fact that growth remains the overwhelming global dynamic and probably will for decades to come. On any given day, after all, more than twice as many people worldwide begin their lives (373,000, as noted above) as reach life's end (159,000). That's cold comfort all the same in countries from Belarus to South Korea, where women are having little more than one child on average. Politicians and demographers worry about the future of such countries' retirement programs, the vibrancy of their economies, and their capacity to project military power or defend their territories.
Fear of losing not just population, but "our" population, also underpins the angst many people express over the high levels of immigration that have changed the complexion of industrialized countries in recent decades. One of the cures offered for population aging or decline is simply to invite in more people from other countries. Already, foreign-born Americans are more numerous than the native-born in Miami-Dade County and in several cities in Florida and California. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2070 there will be no majority race in the country.4 Serious authors like Phillip Longman and Ben Wattenberg, and fearmongers like Patrick Buchanan, have called openly for a return to large families—implicitly or explicitly by native-born Americans—to stave off population aging, stagnation or an immigrant-driven continuation of growth.
Excepted from More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want by Robert Engelman. Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Engelman.