He said Walmart leases farmers’ land, and contracts them to grow farm produce and purchases the products. Contracted farmers can expect an income of 165,000 yuan ($24,302) per hectare a year, compared with the average income from individual farming of 15,000 yuan.

Walmart can use its logistics and transportation system to ensure the produce reaches its supermarkets fresh, he said.

Fu said Walmart has been supported by Chinese government departments and farmers’ cooperatives in developing the purchase bases.

Why can’t we do this in India? 10 times increase in farm income.

Many of us—from development consultants to researchers to economists—want to believe Mr. Prahalad’s argument that we can eradicate poverty through profits. Business leaders want to believe in it, too. But, with the exception of a handful of projects, many big businesses have struggled to make inroads at the base of the pyramid. To drive large-scale change, we must find better ways for big business to contribute to societal good.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be exploring the intersection of private enterprise and social enterprise. I welcome your comments and ideas.

Who is Colin? He is a member of a new generation that will be coming into its own over the next decade. Its members are typically realists and materialists. They are culturally liberal, though not necessarily politically progressive. They are upwardly mobile, yet they live with their parents longer than earlier generations ever did. Many of their social interactions take place on the Internet, where they feel free to express their opinions and attitudes. They’ve grown up under the influence of Harry Potter, Barack Obama, and iEverything — iPods, iTunes, iPhones. Technology is so intimately woven into their lives that the baby boom–era concept of “early adopters” is essentially meaningless.

We call them Generation C — connected, communicating, content-centric, computerised, community-oriented, always clicking. As a rule, they were born after 1990 and lived their adolescent years after 2000. In the developed world, Generation C encompasses everyone in this age group; in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), they are primarily urban and suburban. By 2020, they will make up 40 per cent of the population in the US, Europe, and the BRIC countries, and 10 per cent of the rest of the world — and by then, they will constitute the largest single cohort of consumers worldwide.