End of 2016
more than 5,000 people had already drowned
when crossing the Mediterranean.
A large number of them indeed fled conflicts,
but an overwhelming number
fled from extreme poverty for his life.
By the end of 2016, more than a million people already had
tried to enter the US illegally
and many did so to flee warring gangs in their slums,
an overwhelming number of them fled
for a life of trying to get around with two dollars fifty a day,
because half of the world’s population has to participate.
They have us through.
Our wealth, our lifestyle,
the fairy tale that we live in our country, they have it through.
And they come to get it,
whether it is Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America.
I am not talking about an immigration stop,
I’m not talking about a higher wall.
I’m talking about capitalism.
Because I believe that capitalism
our most powerful weapon is to change the world.
I am a product of capitalism.
The life that I can afford is directly related to capitalism.
Today,
how I spend my money, the life I lead,
what I say, what I do,
are directly related to capitalism.
I have been in socialist countries and in socialist hospitals.
I do not want anything to do with socialism.
I have been in communist countries and in a communist prison.
I do not want anything to do with communism.
I think that capitalism
the most important weapon is that we have in the 21st century
to change the world, both spiritually and physically.
But I also believe
that if we take the words of apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:23,
where he said: “Everything is allowed, but not everything has a favorable effect”,
and we would apply them to capitalism,
that we would then live in a completely different world.
The last ten years have been the number of people living in poverty in the world
dropped drastically.
In the same period
there has been incredible progress in technology and globalization.
So nowadays, now more than ever,
are those large groups that still live in poverty
aware of it as never before
from what they exactly miss
there in the Global South.
Take Honduras now.
From Honduras the largest number of illegal immigrants comes to the US,
per capita,
more than any other country.
But actually that is strange.
In 2005 Honduras signed CAFTA,
the free trade agreement for Central America.
Before that time Honduras was considered the granary of Central America.
People exported food to the entire region and beyond, around 1990.
But when Honduras tried to develop,
like so many countries in the world,
it stopped protecting his farmers.
No more price guarantees for the most important raw materials,
so essential for the local economy;
a protection that many of our farmers still enjoy to this day;
protection that my family has benefited directly from.
Without that protection
tens of thousands of family farms fled.
This is exactly what the owners of the ‘maquilas’, the big sweatshops,
to accomplish
when they lobbied for legislation to lift these protections.
To make CAFTA a success, there had to be production,
production of goods to export to the USA.
They needed labor for production
and those workers had to come from somewhere.
And those were the family farms.
More than 500,000 people traveled from all over Honduras
to the industrial capital Puerto Cortes,
during the past years.
The impact on the GNP of Honduras, the Gross National Product,
the value of all goods produced by the country,
has been incredible.
If we make a comparison of the GDP of Honduras
five years for CAFTA and five years after signature,
2000 with 2010,
we see remarkable things.
In 2000 the total GNP was just under eight billion dollars,
but in 2010 it more than doubled to 16 billion dollars.
However economical you looked at it, it looked rosy for Honduras.
The total import grew accordingly,
from three to nine billion dollars
and total exports grew from two to six billion dollars.
Every economist would say the gigantic investments
by institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
the mega loans to help Honduras break out of poverty,
had repaid.
Honduras generated prosperity and things changed.
But if we look at it in detail
and we look at how many people lived below the poverty line
during those ten years,
then we see something remarkable.
In 2000, the percentage of people living below the poverty line was 51.9%.
And in those ten years that such enormous wealth was generated
in this small Central American country,
would you expect that figure to drop dramatically,
or at least remains stable.
But it did not, it was just 8% higher in 2010,
because then 60% of the population lived below the poverty line.
People, something is not right
if GDP, imports and exports grow dramatically
and at the same time the number of poor people is also increasing.
Look, this is the problem:
life on the farm was heavy, but you had three meals a day.
You did not have the latest technology and you did not have Nike’s,
but the family ties were strong
and you were not afraid of the safety of your child.
Now you work on a large industrial estate,
the income is not what you had hoped for,
it’s hard work, you’re making long days …
You sometimes have to leave your children at home alone
and because you do not have it broadly, you live in a poor neighborhood.
Soon your children have found a new family
and that’s the gangs.
And after a while
are you overworked, overwrought
and you do not pull it anymore and you stop it.
You’re ashamed of yourself so you do not go back home,
you stay inside
and what was first the urban excitement,
now feels like the urban misery
and that neighborhood full of gangs where you live, becomes pretty hopeless.
It does not take long for you to think that is your only option
to start a dangerous adventure,
looking for that elusive American dream in the north.
This situation is happening all over the world
and through the signing of more and more free trade agreements
the world experiences a technological Enlightenment.
The last ten years have been the number of people with access to a mobile phone
explodes in the world.
Growth alone has been exponential in Africa alone.
For example, Ghana saw, from 2002 to 2015,
an increase in the number of users from 8% to 83% of the population.
Comparable figures are reported from all over Africa,
according to the Pew Research Center.
In 1998 I went to Honduras for the first time
and at that time only a few large cities had mobile networks.
But in 2005 you already had coverage throughout the country
and now, remarkably enough, 90% of all Hondurans seem
own a mobile phone.
The pioneers in telecommunications ensured that in the places
where it was once impossible to connect,
you now get a very easy connection.
They can keep it affordable but still profitable.
One of those telecommunication giants,
Digicel, is the property of Irish billionaire Denis O’Brian.
Digicel is active worldwide in 33 markets.
Digicel,
like telecommunication companies with similar strategies,
perfected his approach for developing countries:
mass marketing combined with road phone
where the inhabitants of the poor slums became addicted in no time,
and it made it clear for the first time
to those simple farmers
what they all went wrong in the Global South.
Then those telecom companies went in 2010
thereby also offering affordable satellite TV.
Now you can pay for $ 15 a month
a small, simple, red satellite dish
on the roof of your mud hut in that remote village in Honduras,
where you can look at both local and world news every day.
But you can also enjoy the popular reality shows
that we export from our country,
such as Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.
People, as what we export from our country to the whole world,
conveniently dubbed in French and Spanish,
as what we export as reality
consists of a beauty queen
and a pair of bearded free boys,
Who does not want to come to that?
(Laughter)
Who does not want to be here?
Then in 2013, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new initiative.
Free Basics was called that,
a partnership with technology companies
and telecom companies around the world
for the two-thirds of the world’s population who did not yet have internet access
to give access to it.
Today, more than 15 million people
for the first time using the internet through the Free Basics program.
Show the statistics
that one in ten that used the internet for the first time
escape from poverty.
Now it was not just helping poor people
what motivated Zuckerberg.
The white paper he released in 2013 describing his new initiative,
you might read as an incredible gesture of humanitarian aid
through access to technology,
but in fact it would reach a number of very different goals.
Facebook provided itself with a very captivated audience
to advertise in new and emerging markets,
especially because they could only access the internet via the Facebook app.
Remarkably, more than half of them appear
of all new internet users via the Free Basics program
to have already subscribed to full dates within 30 days.
So what might sounded
as an incredible act of humanitarian aid
in practical terms was just very smart marketing.
And for a huge reality check
many participating countries were in the Free Basics program
located on the African continent.
A continent plagued by conflicts, hunger and failed utilities
could now see, like never before,
how life was in the Global North.
If access to a simple cell phone still had doubts
in those lawless, unemployed slum dwellers,
if there were any doubts about what they were going through,
now would be the affordable satellite television
or the free internet
surely open their eyes.
What we are talking about here are the global poor versus the rich.
On planet Earth, in a country called the USA
the poverty line has been drawn
at about $ 64 a day or about $ 25,000 a year.
That is more than what most doctors, lawyers and top managers deserve
in developing countries.
And on that same Earth
the World Bank draws the poverty line for developing countries
at 2 dollars a day.
Between 1991 and 2005
became the number of people living in great poverty in the world
halved,
only not in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the same countries are located
of Facebook’s Free Basic program;
Sub-Saharan Africa, where the overwhelming majority
from the economic refugees
who risk their lives in North Africa from the North Sea
to enter Europe.
Sub-Saharan Africa saw in the same 14 years
the number of people in extreme poverty will increase from 11% to 28%.
Social and economic aid programs failed.
In the meantime, multinationals continue to increase their profits
from the activities in many of those same countries
where the number of poor goes up even further.
We live in a fallen world and man is not perfect;
we take care of our own skin, for ourselves and for our group.
And we make the same mistakes inexorably
if we do not pay attention to our fallen condition and our history.
In 1776 we spoke big words about equality for all people,
but we made slaves of some,
until the American Civil War, almost 100 years later.
And after that Civil War
an extensive workforce of African-Americans and whites fought together
against bad conditions, low wages and long days
until eventually new laws were issued.
While more and more was being produced in the US,
production costs also continued to rise,
especially through those new labor laws.
Until we realized
that there were cheap labor outside our borders.
How much cheaper we did not know yet,
but we would soon become addicted to it.
150 years later we no longer treat our own compatriots as slaves,
but we use the rest of the world – the developing countries.
And even though we have ever come to the realization
that “all people” also includes African Americans and women,
we still fail to fulfill our promise from the Declaration of Independence,
by knowingly not applying them
to other groups of people in the world.
We do not care about the workforce beyond our borders;
we do not control who we shake hands;
we pinch an eye for those we do business with
to print prices for those products that we want.
While many American companies
deliberately continue to benefit from the misery of others,
the world begins to see that some are in great need.
When we make bad decisions from our company’s own interests,
there are often unintended consequences.
The swelling flow of immigrants in our country can not be sustained.
The swelling flow from Mondiaal Zuid to Noord can not be sustained.
But isolating us is not the solution, we have to innovate.
We have tried to exclude them:
it does not work!
Because even the best castle with the strongest walls
eventually falls when it is attacked by the masses.
But if we were to innovate how we do business in the world
so that the rest of the world would rather stay at home?
What if we innovate in such a way
that the rest of the world can just thrive at home,
so that the rest of the world can pursue that same dream,
in all facets,
that we all want, just at home.
We will have to commit ourselves to dignified rewards for this
that enables workers to do more than just survive.
If you want to protect your country, the future of your country,
if you want to continue to enjoy the benefits of capitalism,
we will have to take measures
to ensure and protect the sustainable future
of the overseas labor force.
The social entrepreneurship of our organization Mission Lazarus
shows that profitable business can go hand in hand with good rewards;
that is also how it can be profitable.
We create jobs
in places where there was very little work in Honduras and Haiti,
where we generate valuable revenue at the same time
which we immediately put back into our development initiatives.
I get it.
When we do our weekly shopping at Jumbo
it is not easy for most people to do.
But I believe that knowing is power
and when we have the power ourselves, we can change the world.
The choices you make today
have a direct impact on the lives of your children and your grandchildren.
But if we do not do anything,
because one: it will not be easy,
two: the shareholders have the last word,
and three: “Yes, come, it’s my business.
I have worked hard for it, it is my money, I decide on it “;
if we do nothing, our current lifestyle,
in Western Europe and the US,
cease to exist.
I think we are smart businessmen and women
to dominate the market in many segments for a long time,
but no one can have the monopoly
about life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness
Until eternity.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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