Cambodia Slowly Reweaves Its Silk Industry

A Cambodian woman dries silk thread at a weaving center outside Phnom Penh. (Photo: Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)

September 22, 2010
By SIMON MARKS
The New York Times

PHNOM PENH — Far from the glamour at fashion weeks in America and Europe, Cambodia’s silk industry is struggling to regain the foothold it lost during years of political and civil unrest.

The government recently named silk as one of eight priority export items to be developed by the Ministry of Commerce. And experts agree that the quality of the country’s handmade gold-colored silk is far superior to the mass-produced white silk turned out by China, Vietnam and Thailand.

But Cambodia is producing just five tons of silk a year, even though demand is estimated to be about 400 tons.

And that silk is selling for around $70 a kilogram, or $32 a pound, much more than the $50 a kilogram paid for imported silk, making it much less competitive when attracting buyers from abroad.

In Cambodia, “the skill and the design are not there,” said Sokunthy Heng, export manager for the Kearny Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on trade links.

Still, there are some early signs that the industry is experiencing a revival. In 2008, the British department store chain Marks & Spencer started to source silk pillowcases from 200 families in Prey Veng Province, and so far 500 kilograms of the product have been exported.

In January, Kearny Alliance created a sourcing report for silk fashion accessories so buyers could locate quality suppliers in Cambodia more easily. (Ms. Heng said she did not know whether the report had led to any deals yet.)

And the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is helping to fund silk sector development. Last year the agency financed a $475,000 project to work with the government to create a production center for silkworm eggs. Seven demonstration farms are also being established to train local residents in rearing silkworms.

The U.N. agency estimates that, if the silk sector develops to meet domestic demand, it will generate employment for 25,000 people and result in import savings of around $10 million per year.

Silk production in Cambodia has always been a modest affair, mainly produced by women living in rural areas that often lack basics like electricity and modernized roads. Many of them also are subsistence rice farmers, focused on planting crops between May and July when the monsoon rains arrive and harvesting in December, tasks that take time away from producing silk.

The silk trade here dates from the 13th century, when villagers started to breed silkworms along the banks of the Mekong and Bassac rivers. Villagers now breed a variety of caterpillar known as bombyx mori, which feeds on mulberry tree leaves for three weeks and then spins a golden cocoon. The silk yarn that forms the cocoons is washed, dyed and eventually woven.

But during the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, between 1975 and 1979, people were forced to cultivate rice on collective farms, devastating the silk industry.

Recovery has been painfully slow — so slow, in fact, that only 2 percent of the thread used to create Cambodian silk today is actually produced in Cambodia, noted Kellianne Karatau, 40, who co-owns and designs clothes for Jasmine Boutique, one of only a handful of high-end fashion stores in Phnom Penh. The rest of the silk thread is imported from a variety of locations.

“As the world supply for silk increases, it affects the price and also the availability of silk thread,” Ms. Karatau said. “So to secure our silk supply we would have to see Cambodia develop its silk yarn production.”

Rising yarn prices hits Cambodian silk industry

August 13, 2010
Fibre2Fashion
Cambodia

As the price of silk yarn imports go up, it is posing a danger to continued existence of the Cambodian silk industry. This is because since end-June, almost half the silk weavers of country have left their jobs, industry officials divulged.

Prince Sisovath Pheanuroth, President of the Khmer Silk Village Association (KSVA), said that the yarn prices have almost doubled, over the corresponding period last year, and that there are no indications of it going down.

The KSVA revealed that, there has been a hike of 46 percent in the prices of silk yarn prices and they now stand at US $40,000 per ton as against $27,500 per ton in the same time last year. Further the prices are expected to rise to a level of $45,000 -50,000 per ton by year end.

The association President further stated that, as the silk yarn exporters continue to restrict supply, he believes that silk yarn prices would continue to rise in times to come.

The country each year churns out around four tons of silk yarn, which barely meets the local demand. Between 2005 and 2009 each year, Cambodia was required to import around 300-400 tons of silk yarn from Vietnam and China in order to produce finished silk products. Of the entire produce, 30 percent of the finished products were exported to overseas markets and the rest was sold in local markets.

As stated by Ke Muny, Deputy Secretary General of KSVA, the price rise proved to be a menace to jobs of about 20,000 workers engaged in the sector, and now with diminishing silk profits, many of those who were earlier engaged in silk weaving are now hunting for jobs in other sectors.

Since July, almost half the weavers across Cambodia have given up their jobs as the finished silk products that they produce are not reaping high prices and as such are no more profits, Ke Muny said.

On April 27, Prime Minister Hun Sen abolished the duty on imports of silk yarn as well as removed value-added tax. Though this brought down the production cost by around seven to 10 percent, mounting prices of the raw material are continuously eating up profits.

'I am sunlight, not moonlight'

Chanta Nguon shops for raw silk in Phnom Penh (Photo: Chris LeBoutillier)

Thursday, August 16, 2007
Marketplace
National Public Radio (USA)

Click here to listen to the show

Meet a woman who's trying to get Cambodia a piece of the action in the international silk trade. The silk empire she's stitched together is the biggest employer in her province. Rachel Louise Snyder reports.

Transcript of the story:

Kai Ryssdal: Break down the global economy and what do you have left? Get past enormous multinational corporations and smaller domestic companies, and you've got people getting up and going to work every day. Our monthly series, Working, takes us into the lives of individuals in the global economy.

In the international silk trade, the Big Three are India, China and Thailand. Today, we meet a woman who's trying to get Cambodia a piece of that action. The silk empire that she's stitched together is the biggest employer in her province. Rachel Louise Snyder brings us the story of Chanta Nguon.

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Rachel Louise Snyder: Chanta Nguon is a small woman, about 5 feet tall. But she's the economic epicenter of the remote Stung Treng province. So when there's talk about her, the effect can be whopping.

Over breakfast at a sidewalk café one morning, she tells me about a merchant whose disturbing dream about her shook up the locals.

Chanta Nguon: The coffee seller just run to me, "Oh, you still alive! The ghost sleep last night said you die!" I said, "What?"

She doesn't put much stock in ghost gossip. But she's got dreams of her own. Like starting a global business in a nearly illiterate region, where trappings of modernity — like electricity — are scarce.

At 45, Chanta is the picture of elegance, in flowing skirts and dark shades, driving down a red, dusty road on her motorbike to work.

Inside this creaky fence is the four-building silk compound called SWDC, for Stung Treng Women's Development Center. She started this with her husband, Chan.

The spinners use old bicycle rims to spool the thread.

This morning, Chanta rushes past two bright wooden workshops for spinners and weavers, past a kindergarten she built for weavers' children to a corner of the compound, where three young women use bamboo paddles to stir raw silk in boiling dye.

Nguon: So beautiful. This is my latest color.

She calls it:

Nguon: Chili. Yeah? Ripe chili.

Dramatic color is Chanta's genius. Each scarf has layers of subtle hues that change with the light.

Chanta's brand of colorful scarves and pillows are called Mekong Blue. She sells them for $16 to $20, and they end up in fancy boutiques in Germany, France, Poland, Japan and the U.S., where they go for $90 to $100 apiece.

In Mekong Blue's first year, they made $2,500 with five looms. This year, on 33 looms, they'll make $60,000.

While most businesses move toward mechanization, Chanta finds her operation works better with more hands and fewer machines. She once calculated that weavers walk over nine miles, in 11-foot intervals, just separating individual threads to prepare the looms.

Other things are harder to calculate.

Synder: How long does it take to make one average-sized scarf?

Nguon: So first, we spend one hour to wash the silk and one or two days to set up the warp. It just half of it, they need another seven days to finish. For that process, they spend another five days.

Snyder: So how . . . I've lost track, how many days are we up to?

Nguon: Eleven to 12 days.

Snyder: For a scarf.

Nguon: No! To start to weave the scarf.

The grand total? Fifteen days. Unless:

Nguon: You see the pattern, the flower pattern? That's another nine days. But if they make a mistake, then they spend another week to remove everything.

This is obsessive-compulsive work. Sixty full-time women earn $50 to $100 a month, where the country average is $25.

But for the women who work here, it's not just about money. It's about status and education.

Nguon: If we can help woman to have her own income, just automatically she, her value will improve — in the family, in the society.

Her life and her business evolved out of tragedy. During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge forced the population into farm labor in the countryside. They abolished money and personal freedom. Families were torn apart.

Nguon: One of my brothers, he was taken away. And we don't know if he still alive or he die. We just lost him.

This disastrous social experiment killed an estimated million and a half people.

Chanta and her mother fled to Vietnam, where they spent 10 years. She spent nine more years in a refugee camp on the Thai border. There, she got an education — first in English, then in women's empowerment while working for Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders. She met her husband, Chan, in the camp. And in 1993, they returned to Cambodia.

At home, she meets her friends and family to cook a simple dinner. Here is where she transforms herself from CEO to friend, mother, wife. She washes dishes in a metal bowl and enlists help from her son.

Nguon: Oh, we need banana leaf, Johan. Can you help mama cut it?

Chanta is trained to be something else — not quite Western, not quite Khmer. She's comfortable in charge, at work or at home.

But such confidence means she doesn't fit with village women. So foreigners on temporary contracts for various charities fill her friendship void. But the faces always change. The first time, she says:

Nguon: We become very close friend, and then they left, and I feel sad again. But it just happened again and again. So every year, I have a new friend, and I lose some friends.

Today's menu is Vietnamese crepes. In the background, a radio plays Khmer music. Chanta tries to teach her two friends to fry paper-thin crepes.

Nguon: Is it hot enough, Ali?

The first crepe crumples.

Nguon: That's not Khmer at all.

As Chanta tries to teach her foreign friends Khmer customs, she sometimes struggles with them herself. It's made it tougher for her husband.

For the first 10 years of their marriage, Chan made the decisions. And she stayed quietly at home. But after a while, Chanta felt like she couldn't breathe.

At first, he fought her change.

Nguon: We compare Asian woman with moonlight in the family. Mean soft, cool, quiet. So I live 10 years, my first 10 years of marriage like that. I couldn't speak loudly, and I couldn't laugh loudly. But after 10 years, I feel it's not me at all. So I start to fight with my husband. I want to be myself. Why I can't laugh, why I can't speak loudly? So I told him, I am sunlight, not moonlight.

Ryssdal: Rachel Louise Snyder lives and works in Cambodia. Her report was a co-production with Homelands Productions.