The 2014 Dhaka Apparel Summit (December 07-08) marks a watershed in setting ambitions for the future of Bangladesh’s textile and garment industry. Our research indicates an annual efficiency savings opportunity in Bangladesh worth over one billion dollar that, if seized, could give the industry a powerful modernisation impulse. The world’s #2 sourcing hotspot after China, Bangladesh’s USD 22 billion textile and garment industry is the country’s main export engine, and already makes an important contribution to national development. To fully contribute to Bangladesh’s goal of becoming a middle income country by 2021 and reach USD 50 billion in exports by then, the industry now needs to both build on its existing comparative advantages as well as keep innovating to resolve its longstanding challenges in terms of sustainable development. STRONG MOMENTUM HAS KEPT BUILDING IN THE AFTERMATH OF RANA PLAZA: After the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza factory in April 2013, an impressive group of players has come together to take action to address the industry’s deep safety problems. Ranging from international fashion brands and domestic producers to international organisations, government, and NGOs, all are motivated to make sure that such an accident does not happen again. The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, and the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire, Electrical Safety and Physical Integrity in the RMG sector of Bangladesh (NAP) have inspected several thousand factories since. They have done a remarkable job in showing what needs to be fixed at the factory level. This is a major step forward on the vision to which, for example, the Accord’s signatories committed, namely “the goal of a safe and sustainable Bangladeshi Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry in which no worker needs to fear fires, building collapses, or other accidents that could be prevented with reasonable health and safety measures.” RECONCILING GREATER COMPETITIVENESS WITH SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE IS CRUCIAL: Fire and building safety are just a few of the many and disparate social, environmental and economic issues that need addressing. Given the industry’s growth ambitions and its infrastructure deficits, we will all need to be very strategic and engineer a systemic solution. As I argued in the report, Creating Sustainable Apparel Value Chains which was released in December 2013 by Impact Economy, the global impact investment and strategy firm, and made available to BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association) members in Bengali, the problems are diverse and wide-ranging, but they nonetheless all meet at the manufacturing stage. Ground-breaking progress toward the overall vision of a sustainable apparel industry in Bangladesh requires achieving a win-win outcome of raising productivity and competitiveness, as well as social and environmental performance. This includes fire and building safety, as well as several other key levers, such as:
” Fostering total resource productivity and transparency across the supply chain;
” Upgrading industry infrastructure by (impact) investing;
” Improving working conditions with a new level of ambition; and
” Studying and replicating the best practices of leading producers.
THE SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS HAVE BECOME CLEAR: At Impact Economy, we were delighted to see that the IFC, the ILO, the Global Green Growth Forum and many others have enthusiastically incorporated these key recommendations of the report into their own strategic thinking and initiatives. Now is the time to drive real progress by designing solutions and implementation platforms that are able to achieve this triple win of greater productivity, a better environmental footprint, and higher social performance not just at the level of demonstration projects, but across the board. Such solutions need to:
* Drive the upgrades in the factories which help achieve competitiveness as well as higher social and environmental performance
* Mobilise capital from multiple sources
* Be financially attractive to the local producer and “factory owned” rather than only retailer or regulator enforced
* Minimise credit default and execution risk
* Become scalable across the industry and go viral
MAKING IMPLEMENTATION WORK IS KEY: In a country where over 5,000 factories produce for export, a powerful contribution to Vision 2021 means implementing factory improvement programmes which are practical, scalable and cost-effective. This means targeting the low-hanging fruit – measures that are easy to implement and cost-efficient. The business case is there. In our research, the top seven simple resource efficiency measures implemented in a model factory cost only USD 83,000, and were hardly ‘rocket science’, including eliminating water leaks from tubes and pipes, reusing cooling water from dyeing operations, process water from rinsing, recovering water from bleaching, reusing heat from drying operations and caustic soda or improving liquor ratio. Yet, they unlocked input savings in excess of USD 500,000 annually. Dedicating resources to improving working conditions can further strengthen the win-win situation, including measures to strengthen productivity, improve labour agreements and working contracts, optimise quality control systems, human resource management as well as decision-making practices. To make such upgrading happen across the board, we will need to design incentive structures that are attractive to factory owners, deliver real benefits for workers, and minimise bureaucracy and management attention for people who, after all, are busy running a competitive business. At Impact Economy, we are convinced that combining impact investing and efficient procurement will be the key forward strategy, and just the complement that is needed to the several development finance-funded initiatives under way such as PaCT or the GTSF programme. THE UPSIDE IS TREMENDOUS: Rana Plaza has made one thing clear: business as usual is no longer sufficient. A more ambitious health and safety track record needs to be built. The enormous opportunity to reach greater value added and sustainability is not yet fully appreciated though. Extrapolating from our research at the factory level to the overall cluster of factories indicates an annual savings potential of up to USD 2.6 billion in Bangladesh. If we conservatively assume to unlock one third of the potential, this would result in input cost savings of USD 860 million every year. In monetary terms, this would be roughly equivalent to the costs of the Rural Electricity Transmission and Distribution Project of the World Bank of 2014-2020 (estimated to cost USD 837 million in total). Just think about the impulse to development. IT IS TIME TO MOVE FORWARD: The time to act is now. Supply chain issues will soon start to become much more relevant to all textile and garment producing countries. As Bangladesh defines its ambition level and strategies to act upon it, it is worth to look further north to the Chinese textile and garment industry. With more than 100,000 manufacturers employing over 10 million people, and successful national brands eyeing international expansion, the changes occurring in the industry in China are tied in large part to the broader social and economic context of the country. China has experienced tremendous economic growth and urbanisation over the past thirty years; some project the rapidly growing middle- and upper-income segments to encompass 75 per cent of the Chinese population by 2025 as a result. These consumers are becoming more demanding in terms of the quality of different types of products. And demand beyond just the wealthiest Chinese consumers is swelling at increasingly fast rates as hundreds of millions of Chinese step out of poverty, and the most successful Chinese brands are bound to go East and West. China has raised its ambition level in terms of the industry’s sustainability, which is listed under China’s national five-year plan for prevention and control of environmental risk of chemicals as a “key industry for regulatory control.” Bangladesh can take ideas from this success story and ask how it can deliver similar or better results in its market economy setting. I agree with former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, who argues that the densely populated and youthful Bangladesh has the potential to become one of the world’s most vibrant economies, and has included Bangladesh in his “Next Eleven” group of countries that he expects to lead the next wave of high-growth economies. It is now time to bridge the gap between reality and ambition so that Bangladesh can indeed become the high-growth economy that benefits the population at large. With cooperation, innovation, and smart approaches to financing, a modern, competitive, and sustainable textile and garment industry could become one of the finest ingredients as Bangladesh brings its middle income formula to life.
