The Hindu Business Line : Around the world on a T-shirt trail

YEAR 1999. Georgetown University, US. A young woman seizes the microphone and asks the crowd of WTO-protesters: "Who made your T-shirt?" Without waiting for answers, she proceeds to throw more posers: "Was it a child in Vietnam, chained to a sewing machine without food or water? Or a young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour and allowed to visit the bathroom only twice per day? Did you know that she lives 12 to a room? That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat? That she is forced to work 90 hours each week, without overtime pay? Did you know that she has no right to speak out, no right to unionise? That she lives not only in poverty, but also in filth and sickness, all in the name of Nike's profits?"

To find answers, Pietra Rivoli, Associate Professor at the University's McDonough School of Business, travelled around the world on the T-shirt trail and the result is a new book titled The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) . It chronicles what the economist in her found about `the markets, power, and politics of world trade' — that free markets are not always free, and that "the alleged victims of globalisation are often its greatest beneficiaries", as the dust jacket summarises.

"Does the world really need another book about globalisation?" you'd like to ask, but that's Jagdish Bhagwati's question in the intro to his recent book In Defense of Globalisation. Rivoli answers that her work is not to defend a position but "to tell a story". A story that reveals "that the opposing sides of the globalisation debate are co-conspirators, however unwitting, in improving the human conditions."

The story begins in the spring of 1999 at a large bin of T-shirts near the exit of a drugstore in Florida, each $5.99, or two for $10. Rivoli buys one and studies the label, `Sherry Manufacturing', with a `Made in China' subtext. Know that Sherry is "one of the largest screen printers of T-shirts in the US," and the company gets blank T-shirts Mexico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Honduras, China, Pakistan, Botswana, India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. "Where the shirts are headed you need sun lotion, but where they come from you need shots," cautions Rivoli.

The China T-shirt she bought travelled to the US in late 1998, and cost Sherry $1.42 including 24 cents in tariffs, says Rivoli. She learns that the product she bought came from Xu Zhao Min a.k.a. Patrick, of Shanghai Knitwear. They meet during his next trip to the US, summer 1999. "Cotton is grown very far from Shanghai. Probably in Teksa," Patrick tells the author, when she evinces interest in visiting the birthplace of her shirt. Teksa? Where's it? Well, he points the place on the globe, and it is Texas. Rivoli flies into the cotton country, Lubbock, West Texas, and describes the view: "Almost lunar nothingness: no hills, no trees. No grass, no cars. No people, no houses." She stops at Reinsch Cotton Farm: 1,000 acres capable of producing about 5 lakh pounds of cotton link "enough for about 1.3 million T-shirts." The author discusses the farming operations, which make for interesting reading.

A cotton boll faces many a risk before it can become a T-shirt. It can't be too hot, nor too cold; neither too much water, nor too little; "and it is too delicate to survive hail or even heavy wind and rain." Plus the threats of weeds, pests, volatile prices, labour availability, competition, business risks and so on. "It is a wonder we have clothes at all," writes Rivoli.

Every shred of value is extracted from the cotton plant: "backward into the oilseed and forward into blue denim." If out of 22,000 pounds of raw cotton, only 5,300 pounds of white lint emerge, the balance may look like garbage, but is recycled to shame "the thriftiest Depression-era housewives."

Frito-Lay is the biggest buyer of cottonseed oil in the world, informs the book. Good for frying chips, you see.

Colgate-Palmolive is another major customer for the oil, for use in soaps and detergents. "Cottonseed oil is also the primary input in the production of Olestra, a frying fat that glides through humans without leaving a trace of fat or calories, and is also an important source of vitamin E for pharmaceutical producers," please note. Cottonseed makes for good animal feed, and high-quality fish food too. "If current research in genetic engineering pays off, cottonseed flour will turn up in the bakery aisle in breads, cakes, and cookies," is a thought for the future.

Though not as shameful as the once-upon-a-time `cotton slave plantation', Rivoli agrees that subsidies are an embarrassing problem. However, more than subsidy, she'd give credit to cotton growers' production methods, marketing, technology and so on. Farmers also enjoy a variety of protection, so any disaster that happens hits cotton, and not the people. Not so in other cotton-producing countries, points out Rivoli, citing the suicide of 500 cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh a few years ago, "as worms ate the last of their cotton."

And this can make you wince: "The farmers could hear the worms chomping, with a sickening click, click sound that kept the villagers awake all night.

Dealers had `furnished' the farmers with pesticides at 36 per cent interest, but it was the wrong pesticide with the wrong directions, and the farmers couldn't read anyway... The pesticides so useless on the worms worked quickly as poison, and hundreds of farmers dropped dead twitching to the ground in the middle of the cotton fields."

Hop on, because from Texas, cotton travels in trucks and trains to ports on every US coast. But there's a stopover at the cooperative ginning factory, owned by the farmers. Next, cross the Pacific, and enter China, where cotton is "spun into yarn, knitted into cloth, cut into pieces, and finally sewn into a T-shirt." After the label is affixed, Texas cotton returns to the US. "China is not only the largest buyer of American cotton, it also consumes nearly one-third of the world's cotton production." Therefore, more US demand for cheap clothing translates as more demand from China for US cotton.

Step into Shanghai Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory, after driving through "an impossibly crowded jumble of alleys and high-rises, shacks and workshops, bakeries and tea shops, bicycles and pushcarts, water buffaloes and chickens." To Rivoli, "South-eastern China is a giant factory floor," and inside the factory, she meets noise as `a metal blanket', even as `a deafening clatter of real machines' take in as raw material cotton bales, "still speckled with Texas leaf bits and rabbit fur."

As consumers, we think `cotton'; but "the expert thinks fibre length and fibre colour, sugar content, trash particles, moisture, and fibre strength," explains Rivoli. "What is the best trade-off between strength and fineness? Should the cotton fibre be combed or not? Should the cotton be twisted to the right or the left?" are questions that need to be resolved, because "a pound of cotton can be transformed into anywhere between 800 and 2,500 yards of yarn." The most important question is, "Who will buy?"

There's still a long way to go for the T-shirt, but I'm pulling you out abruptly from China and fast-forwarding to the conclusion: That the story of the product is more about markets than politics. "To either glorify or vilify the markets is to dangerously oversimplify the world of trade," says Rivoli. Forget shielding the poor from markets, she advises because they suffer "more from exclusion from politics than from the perils of the market."

Don't miss this unusual book on economics.

Economics@TheHindu.co.in

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Around the world on a T-shirt trail