The new Silk Road

Part 1

Vientiane Laos: At the age of 13 Kommaly Chantavong walked over 600km to Vientiane from her home in Lao’s northern province of Huaphan. She walked though a war zone in bare feet. All she took were heirloom pieces of woven silk, legacies from her grandmothers.

Later when the war ended and refugees, many of them women, plied the streets of Vientiane, Kommaly used money earned by nursing to buy looms. She hoped that by rekindling the interest in weaving, refugee women could make money.

In a radical policy reversal, the revolutionary President, Kaysone Phomvihan granted her 40 hectares of land in Xieng Khouang, significant for its silk history. Previously the hard-line Pathet Lao had labeled silk weaving as bourgeoise. Women had to hide their looms or weave cotton. But silk never died.

Women would dream of silk while they wove proletariat kapok. Silk went underground, women weaving at night to maintain skills and to remember patterns. They feared jail or destruction of their looms. Small shops were closed, silk confiscated. In the mid 1980’s silk reappeared, being allowed for some ceremonies, but women were still wary. On the outskirts of the capital Vientiane, women went back to silk work, hoping to survive out of the direct sightline of the party apparachiks.

Kommaly began to build, breeding to combine tough Lao natural silk with the length of Thai and Japanese filaments, and tempered with softness. She researched natural dyes and planted a dye garden and walked for 6-8 hours per day to villages teaching, encouraging and buying. She set up weaving and silk houses where young Lao, both men and women turned out beautifully crafted organic silk fabric of the type that underpins Lao culture and pride.

Eco-textiles are taking the world by storm, the environmental and public health costs of conventional textiles having been recognised. Creative industries are recognised internationally as being a profitable part of the economy. In the midst of financial depression people are remembering that Roosevelt stimulated the US economy by among other things giving a boost to the creative sector. Thirty-five years later, Shui Meng Ng a Singapore sociologist living in Laos told me, the majority of rural villagers in Laos still get most of their reliable household cash from textile products. But the international development juggernaut trundles on, oblivious to the potential under its very nose. Little if any policy attention, much less funding, is given to support an industry that already exists, is environmentally neutral and embedded in the culture. While this story concerns Laos, the issue is broader.

Kommaly, a humble woman who has won two UNESCO craft awards, receives a modicum of support from NGO’s. In the absence of serious overseas connections and production advice, Kommaly’s business, upon which the lives and wellbeing of literally thousands of Laos depend, is still just getting by. Her only design input is from her daughters and the odd traveller who stays at the sericulture farm. “I need to be able to fix colours naturally to guarantee our products” she tells me.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture organisation nominated 2009 as its year of natural fibres. Thinking that Lao would be awash with activities, I twice contacted the Food and Agriculture office in Vientiane to find out what was planned. No response. Madam Anoumone Kittirath, Deputy Director General of Lao’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce did not know of any activities planned for Lao. The FAO had not been in touch. Mr Somsanouk Mixay of the Lao Handcrafts Association (LHA) had the same response. This in a country that celebrates natural fibres every day. Its elegant men and women wear silk as a matter of course. Silk has fostered trade with its neighbours for centuries and is as Lao as sticky rice and unexploded bombs.

Carrying a pejorative taint and a faint whiff of patchouli, the word handcrafts are not taken seriously in international development circles. Handcrafts - the middle i makes the word handicrafts seems even more diminutive - have been debated by gender consultants - some arguing that they cement women into lowly paid menial jobs, never mind pride, cultural relevance or environmental soundness. Largely ignored by the male consultants unless a business model is attached, some mining companies eager to prove their CSR credentials, invest in and encourage small village projects. On the whole, handcrafts have been left to languish, a symbol of a bygone age.

Handcrafts are arguably a subset of creative industries (or creative economy): a set of interlocking industries and activities that create content, such as web pages or jewellery, and things that previously did not exist such as textiles. Economic contributions from creative industries have been increasing, particularly as manufacturing industries have become increasingly automated and process-driven. They are like all creative industries, able to be improved, expanded and modified to suit global tastes.

Mr Khampheng shows me his new motorcycle. It’s a gleaming red with a basket on the front. Already sitting on the bike is his 8-year-old daughter who he is about to take to school 6km away.

“My wife bought this motorbike by weaving and selling pha sinhs (traditional Lao skirt) to passing traders” he told me. “I am just a farmer. The bike helps me take chickens to market.”

Women set up co-operatives to make silk products and seek loans “They vet the woman getting the loan. To make sure her husband does not gamble or drink,” says Ng a rural sociologist. “But unless its International Women’s Day or the annual handcraft festival, creative activities get only lip service.”
 
Madame Nikone of the LHA dreams of a design centre with visiting artists to advise and build local skills and knowledge. “Silk and our natural products have so many applications,” she sighs.

Instead of designers and textile technicians, Lao entices engineers to build dams and mines; export processing zones expand. Environmental consultants and gender specialist arrive to fix up the mess and to make sure women participate in this transformation. But they are there all the time, quietly weaving.

Part II

To enter the temple Buddhist novices need robes. In pre import days, these were woven usually by an auntie, who gained merit for herself and the family by allowing the boy to be ordained. Lao men still rely on women to weave ceremonial regalia.

Secular western consultants often fail to recognise the nuanced power and influence women gain by their spiritual and attendant material activities such as weaving, where sacred images like dragons are transferred onto living textiles.

Now parents buy robes from Tescos along with brown or yellow buckets that have supplanted the finely woven baskets that once contained the accoutrements of monkhood. The buckets are mass produced in factories and overseen by women.

Trade, we were promised, would banish poverty. Internationalisation of production allowed foreign companies to acquire agricultural land and recruit labour touted as being cheap and docile. Consumers are able to buy clothes so cheaply that charity bins in Australia, for example, overflowed with scarcely worn apparel. Hand made clothing is somewhat of a relic and consumers don’t pay the environmental costs of international manufacturing.

Mrs Phonevikeo gave up weaving to work in the export processing zone in Savannakhet in southern Laos. “I thought I would earn more money, but I had to pay for transport to the factory and food. A month ago the orders stopped and now I have no work, no wages. My children have to go to school. I was not a good weaver so people would not buy my textiles. If I could learn to improve it would be better.”

The fibre and the motivation are a given. Craftworkers need technical, marketing and design input. With the trend to environmentally friendly eco-textiles, and the short term paralysis of the export sector, echoes of the silk road could be felt again this century.

According to a recently released report by Oxfam, Paying the Price for the Economic Crisis, Mrs Phonevikeo shares her experience with millions of other women around the globe, who with collapsing markets and user-pays systems find themselves out of work with children to support and significant debts. The promise of income through industrial and service industry work is proving to be fragile as the flowers in ancient designs.

In many Asian countries there is no Plan B, no welfare or social support. Once the edifice crumbles it stays on the ground.

Western Union reported a net reversal in remittances from families to workers, indicating that even migration, the most painful of events for women, was also failing.

It may be time to rethink the modernity project that led women to believe that working in export focused industry for ten hours a day six days a week, often being sickened or stressed by the work environment, was the only path out of poverty.

The New York and LA Times credited American entrepreneur Carol Cassidy with reviving the Lao silk industry. The accolade really belongs to Kommaly Chantavong who had resuscitated silk in the northern plains of Xieng Khuoang. She trained those who later worked for Cassidy, whose hand-woven pieces sell for thousands of dollars in the ateliers of New York, belying the claim that there is no money in handcrafts.

Long time observations by the American sociologist Carol Doolittle and her colleagues found that women in the weaving industry earn 20-40 per cent more than their sisters labouring in factories. Lao’s national minimum wage has not shifted much beyond US$43 per month, despite inflation. Women weavers are paid by the piece or by the meter, and enjoy flexible working arrangements impossible in the industrial sector. “Independent weavers can sell a skirt for US$30-80; significantly more than they earn making t-shirts.” Doolittle said

“When women began to develop commercial silk factories in the 1990s it was hard as for them to be employees, as Lao consider themselves equal. A villager would consider herself equal to employers, even if they were master weavers, so quality control was difficult. Who knows how they cope in a factory with foreign employers who don’t understand cultural notion of equality.”

Interesting thought.

Weaving is intensely social. Women can elect to work in a “factory” with other weavers or stay at home. Young women usually prefer the city silk weaving houses. They recruit sisters or other female relatives from the village. On the other hand married women with children like to be able to earn at home while keeping an eye on the kids and chatting with friends while they work. Weaving is not burdened by loud noise, safety hazards or the need to wear special clothing. You can get up and leave the loom without fearing supervisors or losing pay.

But, I argued with Doolittle, the market is still small. She begged to differ. “I know Laos in the US who order pha sinhs from their families back home for weddings and other formal occasions. It is part of being Lao, no matter where you are in the world. They may wear a white dress for the ceremony but everyone will wear a sinh and pha bia (sash) to the reception. Thousands are sold each year to relatives abroad.”

And that is for woven silk. I spotted a silk filled duvet in Bangkok selling for 12,000 Baht (US$400). A skein of knitting grade silk sells for US$37. Endless possibilities.

But mindsets are hard to shift. Handcrafts or the sharper named “creative industries” barely feature in donors objectives. Lao Government representatives are happy to be photographed visiting handcraft shows and extolling Lao culture, but their interest is said to be linked to self-interest.

Industrialisation has become synonymous with modernity in policy terms. Never mind the attendant risk of factory hazards or, at times like this, the lack of fall back and little if any social security. In Lao it amounts to cultural erosion and increased vulnerability. Creative industries need to be taken more seriously in development circles.