On January 10, Chengdu saw a piercingly cold winter wind. However, Yang Daqing, a 78-year-old widowed man living in Heping Village, Jinxing Township, Dayi County, experienced a warmness just like that brought by spring. After an over three-hour car journey, representatives from the Labor Union and General Administration Department of Industrial Bank Chengdu Branch visited 20 poverty-stricken families and widowed senior villagers in Heping Village, Jinxing Township, to express the regards and good wishes of the leaders and employees of the bank and brought them consolation gifts and money for the Spring Festival. Holding the gifts and money, Yang Daqing was moved greatly: “Thanks Industrial Bank for your care for our common people living in poverty. We can have a happy Spring Festival”.
This is not the first year that Yang Daqing received consolation money. Since 2006, he has seen the representatives of IB Chengdu Branch every year. It is easy to do a good deed, but it's not so easy to persist in doing it. For years, IB has led local farmers on a road to boost the development of rural areas–the road to developing rural a reas, on which they can become prosperous and beat poverty. As the first Chinese “Equator Bank”, IB seeks to integrate the growth of business performance and the performance of social responsibilities, winning recognition and respect from all areas of society with its outstanding practice in the fields of green finance and sustainability.
● Road to Developing Rural Areas
Leading farmers on a business-boosting avenue
Years ago, by chance IB Chengdu Branch knew that the children in the Dayi Mountain area of Chengdu had dropped out of school one after another because their homes were too far away or because their schools were closed because they were deemed dangerous. With a high awareness of social responsibility, the IB people in Chengdu leapt into action immediately, donating over RMB 200,000 to build IB Hope Primary School in Jinxing Township, Dayi County, solving the problem of school age children in the surrounding 10-kilometer area finding it difficult to go to school. Due to the high quality of the school buildings, during a 5.12 magnitude e arthquake, the primary school remained completely intact, also becoming a shelter for local people. In May of the same year, a 10-kilometer cement concrete highway built by the IB Chengdu Branch for Jinxing Township was completed, and the local people warmly called it their “Xingye (business-boosting) avenue ”.
With donations and education assistance as the starting point, IB Chengdu Branch gradually extended its assist ance campaign in Jinxing Township, Dayi County to aspects such as adequate food and clothing, and overcoming poverty and achieving prosperity among student families and poverty-stricken farmers. The branch has launched the following projects for Jinxing Township: Hope primary school, Xingye Avenue, IB Agricultural base, IB health center, IB old people's home, and IB library.
During the process of providing assistance, IB Chengdu Branch realize d that it's better to teach a man how to fish than to give him some fish. For this reason, the bank created the model of “poverty-alleviating donation + small loans to farmers + production assistance”, so as to help those farmers develop modern ecological agriculture based on local conditions. As a pilot site, IB Chengdu Branch signed a one-to-one assistance agreement with Jinxing Township, Dayi County. Selecting 30 of the poorest farmers in Heping Village, Jinxing County, the bank centralized their land and bundled the small loans to farmers together with the donation of the branch of RMB 50,000 as the starting funds, building an “ecological horticulture base” for them. In this way, the poverty-stricken farmers were transformed into “agricultural workers”, and agricultural production was transformed from extensive operation characterized by separated households into intensive operation of a preliminary scale. The branch at its own cost also invited agricultural specialists to teach horticulture techniques to the poor farmers, sent them to study in the areas with developed horticulture, introduced marketing channels to them, participat ing in the entire chain of the modern agricultural industry – production, supply and marketing, so as to achieve the purpose of achieving faster results with less investment over a shorter time, helping the farmers to shake off poverty and become prosperous. Such a poverty-alleviating model based on small loans is different from pure donation and ordinary poverty-alleviating loans. By transforming “blood transfusion” into “blood production”, it provides a long-term sustainable channel for poverty-stricken farmers to become prosperous, thus employing the role of financial tools to support the planning of urban and rural areas as a whole fundamentally.
● Serving Agriculture, Rural Area s and Farmers
A large platform for finance
The comprehensive management of rural land let IB Chengdu Branch see a new field for “finance to serve agriculture, rural areas and farmers”. After undertaking numerous in-depth field investigation s and collecting information in Jintang County, a standard county of Chengdu for comprehensive regulation, IB Chengdu Branch realized that the comprehensive land regulation and centralized allocation of houses for farmers could not only help farmers to improve their living environment, but also relieve the demand on land for development in urban areas under the precondition of guaranteeing no reduction in farmland. In addition, the land after regulation can be registered and circulated at the trading centers of the government for collective construction land targets. In this way, the incomes of farmers can be increased, and their actual difficulties can be solved. For this reason, IB Chengdu Branch innovatively released the loans for rural land regulation projects, grant ing project loans for a term of 3-5 years to the land reserve centers or other qualified subjects around Chengdu for the following comprehensive regulation purposes: transformation of rural farmland, cultivation of wasteland, reclamation of abandoned industrial and mining land, construction of water conservation facilities for farmland, dismantling and integrati on of residential lots of farmers, and the construction of rural infrastructure, etc. The source of repayment comes from the funds for trading of newly-increased farmland targets and vacated collective construction land targets after the regulation and the baseline money of Chengdu for purchasing the targets. In February 2010, IB granted its first loan to the rural land regulation project of the Jintang County Land Regulation Center, amounting to RMB 300 million.
Through comprehensive land regulation, land that had been left unused and idle gained new vitality and the arable land area gradually became ample.“For the area of land not regulated before, a lot of 1 mu could only be leased at a rent of RMB 400-500. After the regulation, however, I believe that the rent can rise to RMB 1,000 at the lowest.” said Zhang Huaichun, a local villager.
With 3 mu of land for planting rice, Zhang Huaichun's family used to earn only RMB 3,000-4,000 a year. After the land regulation, he leased his land to a big farm household, and the rent alone reached RMB 3,000 a year. He was also employed to manage the land, with a salary of RMB 1,800 a month. His family's income has increased greatly.
In addition, IB Chengdu Branch also exerted its regional advantages as a local bank, actively supporting the post-disaster reconstruction of the earthquake-stricken area across Sichuan Province . The branch successively extended credit of RMB 1.4 billion for Beichuan County to construct the new county seat and RMB 1.234 billion for Dujiangyan to construct infrastructure in 205 rural settlement sites and build the “Lingyi Mountain Tunnel” after the disaster. By the end of 2009, the branch ha d granted RMB 6.94 billion in loans for post-disaster reconstruction in the key concentrated rural residential sites in Mianyang, Deyang, and Dujiangyan, etc. The branch has made a great contribution to post-disaster reconstruction.
● Green Finance
Green storm sweeps Sichuan
From its own standpoint, IB Chengdu Branch is based in Chengdu and radiates throughout the whole province, bringing a green storm to the people of Sichuan.
As a branch of IB, the first “Equator bank” in China, IB Chengdu Branch began to explore financial innovations to support energy conservation and emission reduction as early as 2005. The branch first released energy-efficien cy project financing in Sichuan based on the cooperation between the Head Office and International Financial Corporation (IFC). At the 2009 Western China Exposition, IB Chengdu Branch was the only commercial bank to participate, presenting an image of a “green bank”. The branch showed businesses relating to “energy conservation and Equator Bank” and also expressed its determination to commit to energy conservation and emission reduction. During the “11th Five-year Plan”period, IB Chengdu Branch had extended RMB 2.4 billion energy conservation and emission reduction loans in total across Sichuan.
As a practitioner of “green credit”, IB Chengdu Branch has always called on all its employees to conserve energy and reduce emissions from minutia. In their opinion, it doesn't merely mean usi ng less electricity and paper , it means establishing a correct ideological orientation with in the enterprise in terms of shortening office links and improving work efficiency and help ing employees to change their thoughts and work methods and li festyles.
On January 28, 2010, under the lead ership of the Head Office, the branch took the lead in releas ing the “low-carbon” credit card and opening the payment channel for purchasing low-carbon emission reductions. The card provides a practical and feasible new path for individual customers to achieve “carbon neutrality”.
The low-carbon credit cards are divided into two types: one is dominantly blue, with groups of vigorous windmills under the blue sky, in one's hands it is like a breeze stroking one's face; the other presents a white sky and green trees, which transmit the breath of life to people. These are the two versions of the credit cards in the series–“windmill version” and “green leaf version”. Whichever version a customer chooses, it represents their recognition and support for environmental protection.
Since its release over a year ago, t he credit card has won full recognition from all areas of society , and a number of white collars, civil servants and enterprise executives have show n a great interest in it. In the last year, the card was honored with a number of awards in succession, such as one of the “Top 10 Brands with the Greatest Industrial Influence”, and “Credit Card with Outstanding Contribution”. The relevant person-in-charge of IB Chengdu Branch told the author: “Win ning awards is secondary. By releasing such a credit card, we hope to meet the demands of some customers in environmental protection and call on the public to support the low-carbon undertaking wholeheartedly.