Cambodia : Garment sector competes & thrives

Wearing a dark-blue uniform, with red trim, and standing next to a huge ironing machine in a garment factory in Phnom Penh, 20-years-old, Son Sean, smiles and responds: “My family has better living conditions now,” she pauses and continues while pushing a collar into the machine, “From my earnings, my mother has been able to build a 5 by 7 meter brick house with a tiled roof, and my 15 year-old sister has been able to continue her schooling.”

Son Sean is one of many garment workers who come from the poor Cambodian province of Svay Rieng, located about 120 km east of Phnom Penh. She earns on average about US$70 per month, depending on how much overtime she gets, and each month, Sean sends US$50 to US$90 cash home to support her 50-year old widowed mother and her younger sister, who studies in the fifth grade.

Sean’s co-worker, Vong Pak, 39, smiles proudly when asked whether she supports members of her family with her earnings. “From my salary I support my 68-year-old mother, my four children and I pay for my children’s schooling,” she says while sewing a shirt. Pak is the breadwinner of the family. Three of her four children, who are 14, 12, 7, and 3 years old, are in school now.

Both Sean and Pak work at the New Island Clothing garment factory (NIC), along with more than 800 other workers. NIC is one of 290 garment factories in Cambodia which exports goods to the United States and Europe. NIC operates in six countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Lithuania and Mauritius.

The company produces men's and ladies’ formal and casual shirts, supplying these to Marks & Spencers, as well as to premium overseas customers. New Island is a winner of Cambodia’s First Corporate Citizenship Awards which were sponsored by the World Bank Group’s private sector financing arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in 2005.

Cambodia’s garment industry is the country’s main industry and its leading export revenue earner. In 2006, exports totaled US$2.5 billion and the sector employed 330,000 mostly poorer rural women, who in turn support extended families. In total, an estimated 1.7 million people depend on the garment industry directly or indirectly.

According to the report Export Diversification and Value Addition for Human Development which was published by the Economic Institute of Cambodia in June 2007, garment industry workers earn an average of US$73 per month, 29 percent of which comes from overtime work.

Representing almost 80 percent of Cambodia’s total exports, the sector is crucial to Cambodia’s economy. However, increasing global competition makes the industry vulnerable, and so a variety of approaches are needed to help the industry sustain itself. Read more!

Community Project: Fair Trade Fashion From Cambodia

When Japanese art critique Marie Furuta moved from Mexico to Cambodia in 2004 she soon decided to set up "something small" in her new home that would support the community and involve fair trade. Finding a strong fashion industry in Cambodia in general and looking at local, traditional materials, she decided to set up a new fair trade accessory label and simply called Sait - meaning beauty in Khmer!

Now she manages 5 different communities in Cambodia around Siem Reap to produce the accessories from scratch: anything from planting the trees for wild silk worms to grow, to gathering the cocoons for the precious Cambodian silk used for her bags and scarfs, creating the fabrics, designing and finally manufacturing the accessories. There are currently about 150 Cambodians making a fair living by working for Sait (http://www.republiqueair.com/ - sorry only really Japanese at this stage).

To share this spark of positive entrepreneurship today - read on!

Worldchanging: Marie, how did you start your fair trade company "Sait"? What were the first steps?

Marie: It all started little by little. By summer 2005, one year after living in Cambodia, I focussed my formerly vague idea of "helping the communities" on working with silk products, pitched my business plan to local NGOs, raised some money and looked for workshops who were interested in my project. I basically went around Cambodia and talked to the crafters to find out what problems they were facing and how to help them best. I now have 5 communities that I chose to work with and who agreed on this idea of creating bags and products with artisans to be sold in Japan and Spain.

It took me about one year to really fix the ideas of the workshop, create optimal working conditions and find buyers. In 2006 we started selling and things have been going well since then - step by step.

Worldchanging: What would you say is different about the way you run your fair trade company compared to others around?

Marie: There are lots of workshops in Cambodia already and lots of fair trade companies, so people don't view me or Sait as extraordinary as such, but they know that we are one of the few "fair" ones amongst all of those who "claim" to be fair.

I set up 3 important agreements with the people from my workshops:

1. The project must be community based, so it needs to stay relatively small. There are lots of big companies here doing fair trade, but instead of just creating a place for the crafters to go and "give them more work to do", I really wanted them to be able to work from their communities based on their schedules.

2. They have to be involved in the design of the actual product. This protects them from dull labour work and forces them to be creative, think about what they are producing, it educates and makes them more independent - and happier - in the end.

3. Maximum transparency. I have to tell them for how much I am selling their accessories in Japan and Spain, how much the shipping costs, how much the store keeps, how much money I spend for internet purposes etc. so things are kept as transparent as possible. They really need to understand how much things costs and recognize their own and the products' value in the chain of retail. Also we decided to sell the product very cheap (about 1500Yen for a middle size handmade 100% pure silk handbag) so that we sell more and make more profit in the end.


Worldchanging: Why is it so important or the crafters to stay in their community to work?

Marie: It is a real problem to provide work in Cambodia, since there are so many handicapped people due to land-mines. 3 managers out of 5 from my workshops are disabled. Many can actually still work but in order to get to or from work, or onto the chair etc. requires someone to help them. That is why working in a community makes it easy from the start.

On a normal day there could be 5 crafters from one community actively working, but one of them would do all the domestic tasks (helping the disabled, cooking, looking after the children etc.) and the others work on the accessories. The next day they would switch roles to keep everyone involved.

Since they are all good in making the products, it also allows them to go in and out. A while ago someone's brother had a problem and joined the community for some time,
stayed to earn money and once he had enough he left again to look for a new job. That gives people a lot of support in a country where there isn't such a system as social security established yet.

Worldchanging: How do you see the whole aspect of design in your project?

Marie: Design is one of the most important factors, definitely. I want our customers to buy our products because they really love the design - and as a result they are also helping. You cannot build on the idea of wanting to help through fair trade, since - hopefully - one day the country grows and there would then be no need for buying their "products to help" anymore.

The crafters have to learn how to create products of great value that are unique, have a local feel to them but also suit the needs of the customers (e.g. smaller "party size" bags for Spain, stylish silk bags to match Kimono in Japan or bags with an extra compartment for laptops). That is why I am really pushing for locally crafted and designed products that come from Cambodia. If our products convince as a product and you are surprised to realize all the story behind it - then buying these bags is twice as good as purchasing an ordinary product and we achieved our goal.

Also I really believe in handmade things. You feel it somehow! Also - knowing that the product has a greater value than another mass produced item might keep you using it for another year or two - adding to a healthier environment in that respect.

Worldchanging: A lot of culture and an overall identity has been destroyed in Cambodia and it is now on its way to re-define itself. Where do you see your role in this as a young entrepreneur?

Marie: Using traditional materials like silk for our accessories but trying to come up with something new on their own is one way to help our crafters to create a rooted but new identity to touch.

Also 10% of all our sales go to the Modern Art Project in Cambodia supporting contemporary local artists - which makes our crafters understand, that they are also contributing to help their own country flourish by supporting the arts.

This Modern Art Project raises money for Cambodian artists to exhibit their works in Cambodia or abroad - through small donators like us, bigger ones like Art Pacific (http://www.aapmag.com/) or from charity auctions of the artworks.

2005 was the first time that all Cambodian artists got pulled together which raised the awareness that there is such a thing as an emerging art scene in Cambodia in the first place. You should keep an eye on artists like Vann Nath and Svay Ken!

Worldchanging: Any last words from you? Future plans?

Marie: The one thing I am trying to improve right now is that we switch to using organic dyes. Somehow our crafters see the organic, traditional colors and all they can think of are traditional style Khmer bags! They simply freeze. So for now we work with toxic free dyes (http://www.twn.tuv.com/english/Services/product/approvals/tox.htm) from Oekotex (http://www.oeko-tex.com/OekoTex100_PUBLIC/index.asp), Germany. It is a slow process to convince them but we really only just started this, so there is a big learning curve ahead!

Also I am constantly looking for designers who would like to collaborate with us - designing new patterns or coming over to do a workshop.

Thank you Marie and good luck for that!!!

Sait's web-page (http://www.republiqueair.com/) is - unfortunately - only in Japanese at this point. For more info about their products or where to buy them in your country please contact Marie directly marie.furuta@republiqueair.com Read more!

Russian telecommunication operators’ landing in Cambodia

The Russian Telecommunication companies have broken through in their international expansion, having entered the Southeast Asia market. The Altimo Holding has bought Sotelco, the Cambodian mobile and wireless operator. The given operator has no network of its own, so Altimo is likely to resell it in the near future.

The Altimo Telecommunications Holding announced buying a 90% stake in Sotelco, providing WiMax wireless services in Cambodia and having a license for GSM 900/1800. That is the first transaction on purchasing the Southeast Asia assets by a Russian telecommunications company. Besides Cambodia, Altimo is going to make some purchases in Vietnam and Indonesia. Dmitri Vosianov, handling Altimo stake in MegaFon, is to supervise the given line.

Altimo indicates neither the transaction charge, nor the seller’s name, nor the bought operator performance index. When preparing the given publication, it was impossible to get any of the company’s representative for comments. The operator is likely to have been granted the cellular license not long ago, so it has not even started providing the services. At present there are three GSM-operators in the Cambodian market. They are CamGSM (operating in the 900 MHz range under the Mobitel brand, owned by the Millicom International Cellular international corporation), Cambodia Shinawatra (Camshin, 1800 MHz) and Telekom Malaysia International Cambodia (900 MHz, Hello GSM trading mark). Cambodia Advance Communications (Cadcomms) and Applifone also own the unrealized license for the 1800 MHz range.

Thus, Sotelco is the only mobile operator possessing frequencies in both GSM ranges. But Sotelco has no license for the 3G communication. At the same time, CamGSM and Cadcomms have license for 3G compatible with GSM UMTS, while CDMA-200 is owned by Azcom (800 MHz range) and Camshin (450 MHz).

Cambodia population is 14 mln., the absolute market leader being CamGSM with 1.3 mln. subscribers. “The mobile communication penetration in Cambodia is a little bit more than 10%, - Mr. Vosianov notes. – However, the country is rich in natural resources, including offshore oil, its economy growth exceeding 7% a year. We believe Cambodia cellular market growth potential is high”.

However, holding controlling interest is not characteristic of financial investors, such as Altimo. Of all it assets the Holding holds control only over Metrosvyaz CDMA-operator, a small Russian operator. According to a person, familiar with the situation, Altimo is to resell Sotelco, VimpelCom is likely to be the buyer. Altimo owns 44% of voting shares in the mentioned operator and has been reselling its mobile assets in Russia and CIS to VimpelCom so far.

Although the mentioned transaction was the first telecommunication assets acquisition in the Southeast Asia for the Russian investors, the CIS companies has already got assets in the mentioned market. According to CNews, a group of Kazakh investors launched Spice Nepal Private cellular network in Nepal in 2005, which is the second mobile operator in the republic after the public Nepal Telecommunications Corporation. The Kazakh partners in the given projects are the local governmental authorities businessmen. It is interesting the same investment group together with Altimo owns BiTel and SkyMobile, the Kirghiz mobile operators. Read more!

Lao president arrives in Cambodia for official visit

Phnom Penh - Lao People's Democratic Republic President Choummaly Sayasone arrived in Cambodia Monday on a three-day state visit at the invitation of King Norodom Sihamoni.

The Foreign Ministry said that apart from an audience with the king, Sayasone and his delegation would also meet with Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior politicians during his visit.

Lao borders Cambodia to the north and the two nations - both members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - have made increasing bilateral trading ties a priority.

Sayasone, who was appointed president in June 2006, is also head of state of Lao. Read more!

Genocide tourism: Tragedy becomes a destination

By Steve Silva
August 5, 2007

Julie Dermansky is a genocide tourist.

Since visiting the former Nazi death camp at Dachau in 1997, Dermansky, a 40-year-old from Santa Monica, Calif., has seen the killing fields in Cambodia, walked through mass grave sites in Bosnia and stood among human remains in Rwanda. She is, in her own words, obsessed.

"Why go to Club Med," Dermansky, a photographer, asks, "when you can witness this kind of history?"

She is not alone. An increasing number of tourists are traveling to places of horrific human catastrophe. In Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, travelers pay their respects to victims of genocide at popular memorials and cemeteries. Even Kurdistan in Iraq, scene of an ethic cleansing campaign during the 1980s, is promoting its horrible past with a genocide museum. Tragedy has become a destination.

Nearly a million tourists visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in 2005, up from half that the year before. Other former death camps have seen a similar increase in recent years.

Lately at Auschwitz, the growth in tourism has made for some odd juxtapositions. Visitors dine in a newly renovated cafeteria built within the large room where thousands of Nazi victims were processed upon arrival at the camp. This blending of modern tourist convenience and the apparatus of organized death disturbed Dermansky.

"It's a tourist jungle," she says.

While they are perhaps the best known, the concentration camps scattered across Germany and Eastern Europe are not the only genocide sites seeing an increase in visitors.

To accommodate the swelling tourist trade, the Cambodian government last year hired a Japanese firm to build a visitors center and hotel adjacent to the Choeung Ek killing field near Phnom Penh. When the visitors center opens next year, the new company will charge a $3 admission fee rather than the current 50 cents. The town of Anlong Veng in northwest Cambodia is building a genocide museum in the renovated houses of former Khmer Rouge officials to attract tourists.

Tourism Cambodia, a private travel company based in Phnom Penh, offers an assortment of tours specifically geared to genocide tourists. In addition to Choeung Ek, the company highlights excursions to the Tuol Sleng Museum, a school-turned-prison where some 17,000 people were killed between 1977 and 1979; the Kamping Puoy Reservoir, a Khmer Rouge work project made famous by the late Haing S. Ngor in his book "Survival in Cambodia's Killing Fields"; and the civil war museum in Siem Reap. The Tourism Cambodia Web site warns that these sites are "not for the squeamish."

Bosnia on the list

Sarajevo, Bosnia, is another center for genocide tourism. According to the Bosnia-Herzegovina Tourism Board, visits to the country were up 25 percent in 2005 from the previous year and are running nearly 20 percent ahead this year.

"We've come to terms that there are places in our country that attract tourists because of war history," Arna Ugljen, the tourism board's director of public relations, said.

Teri-Lynn Spiteri is one such visitor. She was deeply moved by the plight of Bosnians during the war in the 1990s, especially the massacre of 8,000 civilians at Srebernica in 1995. Watching the news at the time, Spiteri, who has been to the former Nazi death camp at Dachau twice, was reminded of the Holocaust.

"I recalled hearing over and over during history class in high school how 'nothing like this will ever happen again' and 'those who forget the past are bound to repeat it,'" she says.

Spurred by the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebernica and compelled to see for herself the impact of the events she'd witnessed on television, Spiteri, 42, traveled to Sarajevo in 2005. Her friends and family didn't understand why she needed to go. And although Spiteri regularly traveled alone, they were also concerned for her safety. Seeing the anniversary coverage on the news, Spiteri's mother was convinced that the war was ongoing and tried daily to talk her into staying home.

"Once I left," she says, "I had to call every day, and if I missed a day I paid dearly for it on my next call home."

While she did not get to Srebernica on that trip -- NATO peacekeepers she met in Sarajevo warned her that something was "brewing" in the area -- Spiteri did encounter a Serbian general being interviewed by Italian television. Speaking through an interpreter, the general expressed his surprise that she was a tourist.

A need for reflecting

For Spiteri, the trip to Bosnia was the culmination of a decade of fascination with the struggle and recovery of the local people. She says she worries that other travelers bent on visiting genocide sites might not be so reflective.

"If you are going just for thrill seeking, hoping to find 'remains,' or perhaps get a kick out of others' misery, I'm disgusted by that," she says.

Not everyone is sanguine about the development of genocide tourism. Tessa Somerville of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, a private commercial investment firm working with the Kurdish government, is repelled by the idea of dark tourism.

"How can people vacation when mothers are giving birth to babies who are affected by the chemicals which rained down during Saddam's Anfal Campaign and there are many people still searching for loved ones who have disappeared?" she asks.

Some in the travel industry are ambivalent about the spread of genocide tourism.

"To each their own," says travel agent Steve Murphy of Kumuka Worldwide in New York. "I guess people wouldn't offer it if there wasn't a market for it, whatever your own decision on it."

Murphy is afraid that genocide tourism exploits the local population while enriching a few tour operators.

'He cried like a baby'

Rajan Tiwari, director of Kiboko Tours & Travel in Kilgali, Rwanda, shares some of Murphy's feelings about genocide tourism and prefers to point out more conventionally uplifting attractions -- like a temperate climate and endangered gorillas.

"The genocide was and still is painful," he says, "Personally I feel it is quite important that visitors visit to understand the Rwandans better, and they do."

Tiwari remembers an American accountant who while at the genocide site in Ntaramta broke down and collapsed in Tiwari's arms. "He cried like a baby," he recalls.

For Tiwari the genocide exists in two worlds -- a heartbreaking past that lingers each day and a future that holds the promise of understanding and recovery.

Standing in a church in Rwanda where Hutus murdered 5,000 ethnic Tutsis in 1994, Dermansky faced a similar quandary. As she surveyed a scene of horror -- disintegrating clothing and shoes scattered among bones and other scraps of human remains -- she thought about the visitors who would come after her.

If the local authorities cleaned up -- or "sanitized," in her words -- this place, would future visitors feel the same sense of horror that she felt? Was she being selfish in her desire to witness such devastation?

Dermansky is already planning her next trip. It's simply a matter of where to go next.

"Nowhere has a monopoly on injustice," she says. Read more!

Official land grab in Cambodia mirrors situation across region

TRAPEANG KRASAING, Cambodia: Monsoon rains have brought new misery to the residents of this resettlement site outside the Cambodian capital.

Already uprooted from their homes, the hundreds of families living here now have to contend with near daily downpours that flood their shacks with putrid water.

“Living here is a misery,” said Chan Bory, one of the thousands who authorities in Phnom Penh pushed from their homes in a city slum that had been earmarked for multi-million dollar development.

The pre-dawn eviction a year ago to this remote site 22km away was one of the largest single forced moves from Phnom Penh since the Khmer Rouge evacuated the capital’s population to the countryside after seizing power in 1975.

“A lot of children are getting diseases,” said Sithan Phann, coordinator with the Housing Rights Taskforce, a coalition of non-governmental organisations.

“There’s no place for the water to drain. The people’s shelter is not adequate. It’s very terrible for the people living there,” he said.

Forced evictions are nothing new in Cambodia, where tens of thousands have been displaced in recent years amid a scramble for land to feed the country’s booming real estate market.

The facts of the Trapeang Krasaing case have become depressingly familiar, both in Cambodia and throughout Asia: the poor, with little or nothing to prove ownership, lose their land to the rich, either through trickery, shady government investment schemes or outright violence.

“Land-grabbing by the powerful — the abuse of power to evict people — follows the same pattern” across Asia, said Lao Mong Hay, an analyst with the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission.

In China, the ruling Communist Party has admitted that land rights disputes are one of the biggest drivers of rising social unrest.

Corrupt local government officials working hand-in-hand with property developers and industrialists to kick farmers off their land and evict city residents from their homes have proved to be one of the most bitter features of the nation’s economic development.

In communist Vietnam, where street rallies are rare, one form of public protest has become an increasingly familiar sight in recent years: angry farmers camping outside state offices to complain of illegal land grabs.

Almost invariably the villagers say local officials short-changed them in compensation payments when they appropriated their ancestral land and rice fields to build a new road, bridge, office block or industrial park.

As Vietnam launches itself head-first into a new economic era, booking more than 8% growth a year two decades after it abandoned central planning, the number of land disputes is only set to rise, say experts. Expanding economies elsewhere have also sparked an explosion in land grabs.

In Cambodia, the government has granted some 59 “economic land concessions” totalling almost 1mn hectares to private companies, often without fulfilling legal requirements such as impact studies.

These concessions are part of a wider government policy to make fallow land ready for export-quality agricultural goods.

But the result is that huge swathes of land used for decades by subsistence farmers are suddenly taken away, most likely without adequate compensation.

“In a functioning market system, increased demand would mean landowners would reap adequate financial rewards to secure housing,” said one land rights advocate.

“In Cambodia, however, the system is so corrupt that the deals are conducted between investor and a politician who takes a personal profit to ensure that the police force rightful residents off of their land.”

In India, similar “special economic zones” (SEZ) have seen farmers persuaded to sell their land to projects encouraged by the government to spur industrialisation, infrastructure development and economic growth.

So far, India has approved 303 SEZs and set aside 1,400sq km of land on which to build them.

While the land owners are paid, the money is never enough to sustain them in a world away from their life of farming, advocates warned, adding that SEZs have also led to violence.

Fourteen farmers were killed in March when police entered their village to evict them from land designated an SEZ area — causing a furore and polarising public opinion.

“These are enclaves of privilege, insulated from the laws of the land — whether it is labour laws or environment laws,” said social activist Vandana Shiva.

As with many land disputes in Cambodia, the Trapeang Krasaing case highlights the near total lack of documentation — common in countries where landownership has largely been historic and traditional — to determine who owns what property.

Land records in Cambodia were largely destroyed during the 1975-79 rule of the communist Khmer Rouge, which abolished private ownership.

A land titling programme has made little headway in restoring ownership records, which even when they do exist are often simply ignored by those handing out eviction notices.

Tangled bureaucracies elsewhere have also exacerbated the problem, making land grabs easier to pull off and harder to resolve.

In Indonesia, the grabbing of long-neglected plots of land has led to a mushrooming of disputes that are only made worse by rampant corruption and a poor registration system.

One particular type of grabbing on the rise involves the encroachment of agricultural fields and settlements into protected forest areas and parks, a serious cause of environmental degradation.

Chalid Mohamed, executive director of Walhi, the country’s leading environmental watchdog, said the grabs have become “a major problem found in almost all forested areas in Indonesia”.

In the densely-populated province of Lampung at the south end of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, illegal encroachment has reached critical levels, said Sutono, the deputy chief of the Lampung forestry office.

“In Lampung, this encroachment has been going on for a long time, even back 30 to 40 years,” he said, adding there were now even registered official villages inside what should have been protected natural forest areas.

He estimates about 65% of a million hectares of protected forest area in Lampung has been grabbed and converted to settlements and farmland.

“The root cause of this illegal occupation is the absence of work opportunities, and most of the people involved in this usually are willing to leave the forest if they can get jobs or livelihoods elsewhere,” Sutono said.

Ownership disputes have also led to an explosion of court cases in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami displaced thousands of villagers from the Andaman coast.

Many either had no documents to prove they owned the land, or lost their property deeds in the waves.

Some 387 court cases have been filed by companies against villagers since the tsunami, with more than 200 still before the courts.

Another 800 eviction notices are in mediation, according to Suttipong Lyetip of the National Human Rights Commission. Most of the cases that have been settled were resolved through compromise, often with the companies paying out some compensation.

But that is an unlikely outcome elsewhere. Worsening violence has come to characterise the growing number of disputes that erupt in China, where at least half of all land deals are thought to be illegal and the victims get nothing from the transaction.

“The crux of the issue is that governments at all levels plunder the land resources, the commoners see little if any of the money,” said Hou Guoyan, a retired professor from the China University of Political Science and Law.

“Violators get off scot-free and the (central) government is at a loss to solve the problem.”

Beijing has issued a series of regulations aimed at increasing scrutiny over land deals, experts say, but has little power to enforce the law in the provinces.

“The main problem is that standard compensation levels for villagers are too low,” said Liu Xiaoying, a rural issues researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences. “This is very difficult to solve.”-AFP
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