Written by Cheong Suk-Wai - Published by Straits Times on 06/26/2009

LAWYER and social entrepreneur Laurence Brahm remembers being grateful for a plate of pork fat as a student in China in the early 1980s. Mr Brahm, 48, a native New Yorker who now lives in Lhasa, Tibet, recalls fondly: 'We ate that because it was nutrition.

In 1981, the then wet-behind-the-ears political science graduate of Duke University went to Tianjin, China, to study Chinese. A decade on, he found himself advising the country's then-Premier Zhu Rongji on economic policies while shuttling between China and Indochina as an Asian Development Bank adviser.

An alumnus of the law schools of the University of Hawaii and the University of Hong Kong, he has now lived longer in Asia than in his native United States. 'Perhaps I was born here in a former life,' quips the practising Buddhist. In 2002, the hotshot on China heeded his inner voice to help Asia's marginalised by shutting down his investment consultancy and swopping his suit and tie for trekking gear.

He is married to a Beijing-based Chinese banker and they have two young sons. The author and sometime film-maker has made various documentaries on Buddhism and Tibet, notably Searching For Shangri-La. His four-year-old foundation Shambhala works in the Himalayan region mainly in conservation, eco-tourism and sustainable crafts, as well as education and advocacy. He believes these will give people viable livelihoods, strengthen their ethnic identity and give them hope. He was in town to promote his book, The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club. Published by John Wiley & Sons, it is his manifesto for compassionate capitalism, crafted as a 10-point action plan he calls The Himalayan Consensus.

Why did you turn your back on Western economic growth models?
There was a lot of blinkered ideological thinking coming from the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank and the Washington Consensus. This whole idea of taking one model and parachuting it into other places actually leads to economic chaos, and in turn social chaos and physical dislocation.

What's your beef about globalisation?
I'm not saying you don't need multi-corporation (global) investments. You do need them. They transform lives. But they can't be excessive and disenfranchise people from themselves... Much of America's foreign policy problems has been an extension of the line 'We have the right model, everybody else will follow it'.

You say anti-globalisation is a label, so why call your new book The Anti-Globalisation Breakfast Club?
The anti-globalisation movement has always been a symbol of the voice of the voiceless. However, we must recognise that the movement is probably mislabelled. They are not anti-globalisation. They form their movement with the very tools of globalisation, like the Internet. But their organisations are often extremely diverse and focused on particular issues. The voice of the voiceless needs our voice.

How do you plan to do that?
I want to give them a new economic paradigm, the antithesis of the Washington Consensus, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO (World Trade Organisation), or what I call the one-model-fits-all shock therapy approach. (Developing countries) want to have economic development; so does everybody else. But they also want to have their identity. You can have all the economic development you want, but if you lose your identity, you lose your environment, then what do you have? You don't have yourself and you don't have a world to give your kids... I thought an element of spirituality was missing from economics. We assume that everything is driven by greed alone. But people are driven by other things, like compassion... Buddha was a prince and loved politics but then he sat under a tree. Now it's time for him to go back to politics and economics because all the trees are being cut down.

Aren't greed and compassion mutually exclusive?
No! That is my whole point. There is the concept of zakat (alms) in Islam, one of its five pillars. In Buddhism, there are the three great Bodhisattvas representing compassion, wisdom and power. You need all three. You can be very compassionate but not have the resources to do anything. If you have a great intelligence which can develop the best technology in the world, you can use the technology to blow people up.

So what is your economic paradigm?
The Himalayan Consensus has three pillars. The first is: throw out the model. Dump economic fundamentalism and do what works for you compassionately, intelligently and with common sense. The second is to combine top-down infrastructural development, like what China is doing, with the grassroots support of people like (Bangladeshi Nobel economics laureate) Muhammad Yunus (who pioneered micro credit). And the third pillar is intelligent governance. The role of government is to provide health care, social security and infrastructure for its people to improve their lives. You also have to go beyond simply 'this or that country's government' and build institutions that are transnational in their approach.

Why should that matter?
There's been a very significant change in the way global decisions are made. You've (now) got Brazil, China and India at the table with the United States, Britain and Japan. But where the anti-globalisation movement has lost momentum is in its inability to convert the voices in the street into voices in institutions, because you need both. You're not going to get away from that. * What's the better approach, then? Don't go to a country and say 'I know. I will teach you.' Go there and say: 'I will learn from you.' When I was advising the central bank of Laos, it asked me to draft laws for credit cooperatives. The IMF and World Bank said: 'Oh, we have those laws.' I said: 'No. Let's go to a monastery and see what happens when monks lend rice to farmers. How do farmers pay them back?' So let's not come with models. Just dust off the values in front of you.

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