Yunus calls people ‘bottom line of social business’
The entire objective of the Grameen Danone Company is to bring nutrition to the malnourished children of Bangladesh. (Credit: Mark Knobil, Some rights reserved.)
Economist Muhammad Yunus is on a mission to promote a new type of business for the 21st century.
A social business – according to Yunus’ definition – doesn’t yield a dividend for shareholders. Instead, its bottom line is people. He talked about the Grameen Danone Company, his recent venture that produces and sells nutrient-enriched yogurt to poverty-stricken families in Bangladesh.
Muhammad Yunus: The company is a social business. The owner of the company, Danone Grameen, they will never take any dividend. The entire objective is to bring nutrition to the malnourished children of Bangladesh. So those micronutrients that are missing in the malnourished children, we put it into the yogurt and then sell it at a very cheap price to those children.
Great care was taken in planning every detail, from taste — Bangladeshi children have a bit of a sweet tooth – to ensuring that local milk is used, to designing micro-sized factories to sell the yogurt immediately to the people who live nearby. And there’s even plans for an edible cup.
Muhammad Yunus: Unlike the conventional profit-maximizing business, where the bottom line is how much money you make, in a social business, it’s how many people you have benefited. Money-making is a very important part of a human being, but it’s not the totality of a human being. A total human being is much bigger.
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The world needs many more economists and business people like Muhammad Yunus. This is a brilliant concept, I hope the execution is very successful.
Why not choose Mr. Yunus to become leader of the World Economic Forum, or the Bilderbergers, or The Trilateral Commission? Then we could away from selfishness, unconscionable hoarding of resources and obscene wealth accumulation toward brilliance, sharing and cooperation.
Without intending to oversimply or else divert attention from the important matters discussed here, it appears that we now have 6.6 billion (soon to be 9 billion) members of the human community. Each human organism has to eat. Only the prodigious success of the global expansion of agriculture can reasonably and sensibly account for the spectacular increase of absolute human numbers to skyrocket worldwide as they have been for the past few hundred years.
From a species perspective, more food production/distribution equals more human organisms; less food/distribution equals less members of the human species; and in any and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Human consumption, production and propagation activities, that have been adamantly and relentlessly pursued by the predominant AGRI-culture, appear to be occurring synergistically on the surface of Earth. When taken together, each of these global human overgrowth activities is occurring at a current scale and anticipated growth rate that the human species is growing beyond the Earth’s capacity to sustain life as we know it, I suppose.
Thanks to Mr. Yunus and all.