The new Silk Road

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.