Who said its too soon for a socially responsible China?

Courtney

Social entrepreneur Sherry Poon did in her most recent interview on Responsible China. Sherry started Wobabybasics - a retail outlet located in Shanghai that specializes in organic baby clothes -after the birth of her first child. Unfortunately, Sherry's original plan of producing in and for the Chinese market fell through. On the supply side, companies would lie about the organic authenticity of their cotton fabrics. And on the demand side, Sherry was having a hard time finding local consumers for her goods. In the end, Sherry decided to found her company in Canada and maintain a retail location in Shanghai.

Sherry is not the only one who has faced the demand side problem. Marie So and Carol Chyau, co-founders of Ventures in Development, also did when they founded Mei Xiang Cheese Factory, offering yak milk cheese from Tibet. When I first met these two women during a Yale event in early 2006, they were excited about the possibility of bringing the home-made organic products to the Chinese market. Unfortunately, we have yet to see a ton of their cheeses in supermarkets around China. Mei Xiang Cheese has made it into a few western grocery stores, but has failed to penetrate the maintstream Chinese market.

Regardless of these outcomes, Speth Delk - former Nike CSR regional director - with husband Jeff Delkin have decided to carry the torch forward. They recently founded NEST, a retail collective aimed at uniting intelligent design with responisble manufacturing through collaboration among eight different brands selling sustainable products. NEST focuses on natural, renewable, or recyclabe materials; a low impact manufactring process; and the provision of social benefits to Chinese workers. The ultimate goal at NEST is to create a more responsible China marketplace where consumers are conscious of how goods came from the ground through the manufacturing plant into their home.

So will NEST be successful in penetrating the Chinese market? And if not, when will they be?

The truth is, we don't know. In May 2007 when Casey I first came up with Wokai, we originally wanted to make Wokai a "China helps China" model. We didn't like how the Kiva Model exacerbated the problems of past poverty alleviation models - keeping developing countries reliant on the developed world. Instead, we wanted to create a peice of technology that could be used in-country by Chinese for Chinese, so that China would not need to rely on the US to solve its poverty and income gap woes.

But, in the end, we structured Wokai similar to Kiva with funding coming from the US into China. Nearly everyone we spoke to in both the US and China told us that we would not be able to mobilize funds for charity from your everyday Joe in China.  The  social awarness - that prompts me to pop on Kiva and give $25 dollars to someone in Nicaragua I have never met - is lacking in China. Not by fault of the Chinese, but instead due to timing.  The middle class is still growing in China. People expect it will be a good ten years before China hosts a flourishing middle class like its equivalent in the States - with social societies, community organizations, and interest groups all advancing social initiatives.

Or will it? China's development is unlike ours in the States. It is fast-paced and foreign-influenced. As such, we are seeing crazy first-world and third-world combinations: mobile banking and traditional banking, solar energy and coal energy, organic food and traditionally-farmed foods, socially responisble and un-socially responsible. China is putting to work Western innovations and technologies that have come out of 50 plus years of research and investment.

But more than this top down movement, there is a viral one too. Foreigners in China are picking up and moving to China. There are over 300,000 foreigners now in China and that number is growing. That means that number of Sherrys, Maries, Carols, Jeffs and Speths in China is also growing. And, to fund their innovations, so are Western companies like Ogilvy, Nike, GE, and Lexus with CSR departments that are mandated to give x% of their revenues back to the local market in the form of grants and education.

So where some may say it is too soon for a socially responisble China, I say not so fast. My guess is that in five years in China we will see organic food in local markets, socially responisble products at local furnisher stores, and fundraising for Wokai amongst upper middle-class Chinese in Shanghai and Beijing.

Comments

[Erica Schlaikjer]

Thanks for the shout-out! If any socially responsible ventures want to post announcements or job opportunities for their start-ups, please consider the ResponsibleChina job board:

http://responsiblechina.jobthread.com/

Thanks!

[Fiona Foxon]

Hi Courtney,

Fiona Foxon here, from the Ventures in Development team. We're really excited to see that you guys have kick-started Wokai; it's wonderful to see the breadth of new projects and organizations getting involved in the region. Opportunities for cross-collaboration and knowledge sharing are limitless.

I just wanted to comment on your entry, in which you use Ventures in Development and our Mei Xiang Yak Cheese Project as an example of a project hitting the demand-side road block due to a socially irresponsible China.

You mention that the objective of our project was to bring our organic yak cheese to the Chinese market. However, as much as we'd like the average Chinese consumer to eat our delicious yak cheese, it was never our intention to mass produce it for the shelves of hypermarts around the country. I think the topic of China as socially responsible or irresponsible nation leaves room for great debate, but in my comment here, I hope you won't mind if I just update and inform your readers on the real objectives behind Ventures in Development and the yak cheese project.

Our goal at Ventures in Development is to help our local cheesemaking family to make an natural, delicious western-style cheese, by using local resources naturally abundant in the community (located in Western China's Yunnan Province, and NOT Tibet), to bring sustainable development to the region. The focus for ViD is how best to bring development to these impoverished communities using a sustainable business model. With the yak cheese project, the ViD team helps to provide the family with some technical and marketing expertise as the family develops their own enterprise skills. We also source the yak milk directly from communities of nomadic herding families to provide them with a long-term source of sustainable income. Similarly, with our sister project, Shokay, we aim to source yak down fibers directly from nomadic herding families to create a socially responsible product for socially conscious consumers. See www.shokay.com or www.meixiangcheese.com for more information.

Actually, the demand for our cheese isn't the problem at all, but as I mentioned above, it was not our objective to sell the cheese purely to the domestic Chinese market. In the 2 years since you first met Carol and Marie in 2006, ViD has helped the cheesemakers to build a new factory in accordance with international regulations (completed in the summer of 2007), overseen the first season of cheese production (summer of 2007), opened up a small cheese shop to provide a local sales outlet for the cheese and raise awareness for rural social enterprise work, and liaised with distributors both domestically and internationally to line up sales channels for the cheese. After analyzing our first year of cheese production and balancing that against the extremely seasonal nature of the business, we decided to selectively target a mature audience with an appreciation for fine cheese.

Currently, you can find our Shangri-la Yak Cheese on the shelves of an organic food store in Hong Kong, NaturoPlus Wholesome Foods. For our cheesemakers, the problem pointed more towards SUPPLY. We're a small cheese factory, not a giant Cheddar churning machine. We can only make so much cheese per year!

Well, I've written a lot more than I intended, but thank you for raising an interesting topic of conversation and for allowing me to update your readers on the goals and progress of the ViD and the Mei Xiang Yak Cheese project. The project is by no means perfect, nor near completion, but it's well underway and achieved some significant milestones for our cheesemaking family and the herders.

Want to try the cheese?! For any readers in Shanghai - you can try some at our new 'Shokay' shop opening in Tai Kang Lu on June 15th. Or, if you're based in Hong Kong, come and try some in the Star Street area of Wan Chai, at NaturoPlus Wholesome Foods. We hope that after our second year of cheese production, the Shangri-la Yak Cheese will become more widely available in local groceries, but you certainly won't be seeing it on the shelves of low-to-mid end supermarkets in China anytime soon!

Happy yakking,
Fiona obo the Ventures in Development Team