AsiaLIFE

Cambodia does silk. And as Nathan Green and Tum Makara discover, it is one of the Kingdom’s best prospects for economic development.

On the banks of the Mekong a Cambodian artisan sits in the cool air beneath her traditional, raised wooden house and weaves a white silk krama. The 21-year-old uses the same tools and technique she has used ever since she began learning her craft at her mother’s knee a decade earlier. Not much else has changed in that time either. The prices Pharen receives for her products have risen slightly, but so have the costs of her raw materials.

Still, it is an easy, enjoyable life. She receives US$2 from the village middleman for each of the two silk krama she weaves each day. When combined with profits from the other two looms the family operates this is more than enough to live on, even after costs are deducted. The scene repeats itself more than 100 times as Prek Chrey Lech village stretches gently along the riverbank. When not planting and harvesting rice as the river recedes in the dry season, the majority of the families in the village weave silk.
As village middlewoman Huang Hup has a privileged position. She supplies the weavers with raw materials and handles the sale of their fabrics in Phnom Penh. Lotus Pond, a handicraft retail outlet in the capital, takes the higher-quality goods while the remainder are sold at traditional markets in the capital, such as the Russian Market.

For a lower-quality silk scarf she gets about US$3, of which 70 cents is profit. With hundreds of weavers from the village supplying her it is a tidy income. But she explains that while she makes a profit out of others’ labour, without her capital there would be no work.

Winds of Change

The system has worked for hundreds of years, dating as far back as the thirteenth century in some parts of the country. But the gentle tranquillity of the village is being disturbed. Men like Ho Chomnab and Heng Seiha have come to the village demanding change. Few are complaining for Chomnab and Seiha are the face of a donor-backed project trying to help the village, and dozens like it throughout the country, improve their skills in weaving and business to ensure a higher income.

“They have traditional skills but we provide them with modern techniques to lift the quality of their fabrics,” says Chomnab, a marketing manager and technical advisor for the Cambodian Sector-wide Silk Project. Chomnab is helping the villagers learn new techniques to reduce the time it takes to prepare their looms. He is also helping them improve their handling of raw silk. Backed by the International Trade Centre, the technical cooperation agency of UNCTAD and the WTO, the project hopes to develop the entire value chain of the sector – from growing mulberry trees to raising silkworms, harvesting silk yarn, weaving and marketing. Silk is seen as a cornerstone of the Kingdom’s long crawl out of poverty.

The project is involved with 30 weaving communities in Cambodia – 26 in Takeo Province, three in Prey Vang Province and one, Pharen’s village of Prek Chrey Lech, in Kandal Province. The village has been involved since April this year, but so far just 12 weaving families have joined. “People don’t want to pay the 20,000 riel (US$5) annual fee to join the local association because they can’t see the benefit,” Pharen says.

Reaching International Buyers

They would do well to talk to weavers from Tanorn in southern Cambodia’s Takeo Province, where a group of weavers set up their own Handmade Textile Association (HTA) in 1999 and joined the Cambodian Craft Cooperation (CCC), an association of small business enterprises founded in 1997 with the assistance of the Chamber of Crafts in Koblenz, Germany. CCC introduced training programmes focussed on skills, tools and equipment but it was the arrival of ITC in 2003 that really got the ball rolling. The agency was looking to implement an Export-led Poverty Reduction Programme (EPRP) in the country, explains Marie-Claude Frauenrath, trade promotion adviser for ICT. It decided to support CCC’s efforts in the village.

In addition to community building and technical training, the EPRP project helped with the preparation of marketing tools such as the www.silkfromcambodia.com e–sales website, catalogues and brochures and facilitated CCC’s participation in several national and international trade fairs. Seung Kimyonn, CCC’s executive director, says that once weavers lifted the quality of their products – such as through the use of environmentally friendly azo-free dyes that conformed to E.U. import regulations – they found an international community hungry for their products. Annual sales amounted to US$320,000 by the end of the project in 2007, half of which came from exports. The monthly income of almost 100 weaver families in the programme rose from an average of US$20 in 2003 to between US$70 and US$100 in 2007.

CCC made its first visit to an offshore trade fair in February 2007, returning with ten confirmed orders from international buyers, but only in small quantities of about US$2,000 to US$6,000 per buyer. When they returned to Frankfurt’s Ambiente Fair in February 2008 word had spread. Kimyonn returned with 15 buyers each ordering between US$3,000 and US$22,000 worth of products. The CCC now stands on its own feet as a successful commercial venture and is replicating the pilot project with around 100 families in five new weaver communities. Buoyed by its success, the ITC has turned its attention to developing the entire sector through the Sector-wide Silk Project.

Moving Beyond the NGO

The Artisans Association of Cambodia (AAC) is a training and trade facilitation organisation that works directly with more than 42 social enterprises across the country, including the CCC. AAC members earned almost US$2 million from exports in 2007, up from just US$200,000 in 2003, according to association director Men Sinoeun. Export revenues grew 26 percent in the first half of this year to US$1.4 million. With international demand growing rapidly, the association’s biggest challenge is sourcing enough high-quality silk products from its members.

“We can’t respond to demand from commercial buyers because we cannot fulfil the quantity of orders and meet their timeframes,” says Sinoeun. Most of its members were established as NGOs to provide skills based training and incomes to trafficked women, the poor and the disabled. The income from sales sustained the operations but in many cases it was a secondary goal. Sinoeun is now encouraging them to split off their commercial operations to improve productivity, and hence income for the people they are trying to help. “Many are still thinking in an NGO way but need to start thinking like a business,” he says. He singles out Peace Handicrafts and Silks – an independent cooperative of landmine and polio disabled artisans – as a member that has made a successful transition.

Reviving Domestic Silk Production

Prince Pheanuroth Sisowath, an official with the Ministry of Commerce, is the ITC’s point man on the ground in Cambodia and the project coordinator for the Sector-wide Silk Project. He has been involved with the revival of the silk sector since donor funds began flowing into the country following UNTAC-sponsored elections in 1993.

While Sinoeun struggles to lift the quantity and quality of the silk his association’s members produce, Prince Pheanuroth is turning his attention upstream to silk yarn production. “My problem today is quantity,” Pheanuroth says. “The market is here but we can’t produce enough silk." The bulk of the estimated 4,000 tonnes of raw silk used by Cambodian weavers every year is imported from Vietnam by just four Khmer families, primarily from Vietnam, but rising global demand for yarn and silk products means Cambodia is often left with the lowest quality yarns. The project aims to lift the quality of imported silk.

They are also building on work begun by the French Development Agency in 2002 to revive domestic production of Khmer golden silk. Sourced from a silkworm only raised in Cambodia, products made from Khmer golden silk are highly sought after by the high-end international market. Silk production, or sericulture, was largely destroyed during the Khmer Rouge years. Only 15 hectares of mulberry trees survived the regime, all in the Phnom Srok district of Bantheay Meanchey Province. These trees produced less than 800 kg of silk each year, down from a peak of around 150 tonnes of golden silk yarn around the end of World War II. The project has extended sericulture to more than 100 villages in Bantheay Meanchey and neighbouring Oddar Meanchey Province, lifting annual production of golden silk yarn up to 4 to 5 tons by 2005. The project hopes to lift production to 38 tonnes, to meet around 10 percent of Cambodian silk demand, by 2010.

Prince Pheanuroth estimates it will take around 30 years to establish the whole value chain of the Cambodia silk sector – from mulberry bush to market – but believes great progress towards that goal has been made over the last 15 years. “What we have done up to today is important because we have introduced the techniques again,” he says. “But we can improve more.” He cites a conversation with a Korean expert from the FAO, who reminded him that silk was one of South Korea’s main sources of income when it started to rebuild itself. “Look where Korea is now,” he says. “There is a huge amount of money we can get from the silk sector.”

Some of that money will make its way back to Prek Chrey Lech village on the banks of the Mekong. It is unlikely to ever make Pharen and her family rich, but it will ensure their survival.