Political disruption holds up delivery of products

The clothing industry is the main export engine of the Bangladesh economy, and has thrived despite years of political upheaval and catastrophic factory accidents.

Economists say low-wage Bangladesh - where 4m people, mostly women, already work in garment factories - should be able to gain as many as 15m of the 80m industrial jobs expected to move out of an increasingly prosperous China in the next decade.

This year, however, there are signs of a severe slowdown in the business of supplying clothes to high street stores in Europe and the US. The blame lies more with the political violence that has wracked the country and disrupted transport since January than with the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster, the collapse of a multistorey building near Dhaka two years ago in which more than 1,100 garment workers died.

According to the Export Promotion Bureau, ready-made garment exports rose just 3 per cent in the nine months to the end of March, to $18.63bn from $18.05bn in the same period of the previous financial year. Clothing still accounts for more than 80 per cent of the country's exports, but industrialists say they will find it impossible to meet this year's official target of 10 per cent growth in the garment trade, let alone match last year's 14 per cent expansion.

While Bangladeshi manufacturers and established foreign buyers try to put Rana Plaza behind them - the UK's Primark says it has paid $14m in compensation to 668 workers or dependants from its supplier New Wave Bottoms - investors and trade unionists say orders have been affected by the violent opposition protests that shut the Dhaka-Chittagong road. One analyst in Dhaka quoted his business contacts as saying they were still working on orders agreed last year, while the next round of orders seemed "shaky".

The cost of transporting a truckload of clothes to Chittagong has on occasion risen to five times the normal price because of the risk of petrol bombings. Buyers have sometimes chosen to meet their suppliers in Bangkok or New York rather than in Bangladesh itself. April, however, has so far been relatively calm.

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