Unintended Consequences
October 19th, 2006 @ 8:45 pmI know that the whole (half) idea of a blog is seat of your pants commenting, but I have to bring up an interesting story from last week on NPR that was part of a Morning Edition series on what’s causing economic stagnation in Africa. One of the more intriguing points was that the undermining effect of second-hand clothing from the West:
In Mozambique, cotton producers say that it’s not just agricultural subsidies that are stacked against them. They say the West also dumps second-hand clothes into Africa at prices that stifle local textile production.
Vincent Marush Sando, who coordinates a domestic-cotton promotion campaign in Mozambique’s capital Maputo, says Africa should place stiff import duties on used clothes from the West.
It was a logical theory - products whose manufacturing costs have been absorbed in their prior sale are logically much cheaper to distribute that new, domestic clothing.
What got me thinking about it again was a listener letter this morning on Morning Edition essentially calling bullshit on the idea that secondhand clothes could harm the economy because there would still be jobs generated by transportation costs.
Except, that’s not the point. Such a counter-argument is seemingly based on a flawed premise, i.e., there are no “transportation costs” associated with domestic clothing production or that the difference in costs is greater than all the other jobs created and required by home-grown textiles, which I can’t imagine being true. The story talked of factories employing hundreds being shut down, not some sort of nearly costless subsistence clothing production with no transportation costs. It would seem that in addition to jobs in transportation, the home-grown industry would include jobs in the textile mills and clothing factories and jobs in the fields producing the cotton. Competition is good, but you can’t deny that this is a bit unfair. The second-hand clothes only have transportation costs so their prices can be comparatively low, regardless of quality. (Though I will presume that any designer or very high quality used clothing is ending up in “vintage” stores and consignment shops not Mozambique.)
I can’t pretend to know what sparked the letter writer’s response, but when I first heard the story last week, I was struck most by the implication of it - that charity was working against development. A funny thought, given that when you think of charity, you imagine something that usually supports or is neutral to development. Homeless shelters, giving blood, disaster relief, donating to cancer reasearch - none of these competes with business.
But the company picnic T-shirts and the hats and tees from the sports teams that lose championships would compete with the textile industry. And that’s a terrible result and hard to believe because it’s so instinctive that donations = good. People don’t want to think of their hopefully selfless act of charity being a remotely destructive force, so it’s an unacceptable conclusion.
Perhaps the most neutral approach would be to send money abroad and donate your clothes locally.
