What Follows Export Quota Removal?

Click here for an update on the situation of the country's workers since the lifting of the textile and garment quotas on 1 January 2005.

"Tensions are rising in the factories, and mounting trade union repression will tarnish foreign investors' image of the country if it is allowed to persist," says an ICFTU report.

While urged the WTO, the international organisation responsible for world trade, to study the consequences of ending the quota system, this piece provides some dire warnings. It provides a stark contrast to the coverage
provided in the International Herald Tribune which suggests that much of Cambodia's garment industry is holding its own, despite the pricing challenge from China.

Cambodia, whose garment unions have become an independent political force in a country that is otherwise awash in corruption and cronyism, may point the way for other countries seeking to avoid a race to the bottom as they struggle to establish or sustain footholds in the global economy.

Despite the loss of special access to the U.S. market that had been tied to the labor program, the Cambodian government, many garment factory owners and the unions here are sticking to their higher standards. The system relies on independent inspections of factories, postings on the Internet of violators, and some of the strongest labor unions in the developing world. All here agree that this positive imprimatur has helped Cambodia escape much of the convulsions that are sweeping through the global apparel industry.

Indeed, according to the International Herald Tribune, the industry has played a pivotal role in achieving far superior results than many foriegn aid programs.

Since the 1992 Paris Peace Accords formally ended this country's 22-year plague - as a battle zone in the Vietnam War, followed by the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge revolution and another civil war - foreign countries and international organizations have spent more than $7 billion to help put this country back on its feet.

But all that money has failed to stop a slide in literacy rates and the quality of health care. Except for the garment industry, the pandemic of official corruption here has mitigated nearly all of the efforts at improvement, according to new studies by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development.

"The labor program in the textile industry is more important to Cambodia than any other development program because we know the wages go directly to Cambodian workers and raise their standard of living," said Roland Eng, Cambodia's ambassador-at-large in charge of development issues.

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