To revive what used to be a thriving garments industry, manufacturers have urged the government to address the youth’s losing interest in sewing and the heavy cost of introducing new brands in the market.
In a recent roundtable with trade officials, garment makers belonging to the Baclaran Association of Garment Producers Inc. (Bagpi) and I Love Taytay Garments Producers Inc. (Igpai) said they are facing challenges in manpower, as well as in marketing. The Rizal-based sewers are suffering from scarcity of laborers, according to Bagpi President Manuel Cruz.
“Dressmaking is no longer part of the schools’ curriculum. Thus, we are having difficulty serving the market demand,” Cruz told Board of Investments (BOI) officials.
An Igpai representative said garment manufacturers have yet to study new marketing strategies that will bolster the branding of their products. This was largely due to their incapacity to explore branding schemes, as doing so will certainly entail additional expenses.
“Most of the garment manufacturers here sell their items in bulk to retailers and online resellers. These retailers and resellers are often the ones putting the brand names to these items,” the Igpai representative said.
For the government’s part, Trade Undersecretary and BOI Managing Head Ceferino S. Rodolfo Jr. said the agency will find ways to make the Rizal garments industry more competitive.
The government is eyeing as one option sourcing textile from nontraditional sources like Vietnam, Pakistan and Turkey, Rodolfo added. Importing textile from these economies will not only upgrade the capabilities of garment manufacturers, but will also expand their market.
“Our garments industry used to be one of the top-performing sectors, both locally and internationally. But with challenges brought about by the end of the Multi-Fiber Agreement [MFA], which grants preferential tariffs to Philippine exports of garments and textiles, we saw a decline in the sector’s general performance,” Rodolfo said.
“We, however, observed that while this is the overall state of the sector, the garments industry here in Taytay [in Rizal] is thriving despite challenges, and we hope to replicate this successful model to other parts of the country,” he added. Garments production is one of the industries the province intend to maintain, with about 190 registered manufacturers, 52 remnant cloths sellers, 29 authorized ready-to-wear retailers and 4,000 flea market vendors, according to the Taytay Business License Processing Office.
Beginnings
The Taytay industry can be traced back to as far as the 1950s, when remnant textiles from New York were imported to the province through the efforts of its then municipal mayor. Sewers were mostly operating on the ground floor of their houses to lessen overhead costs, as well as permits and licensing requirements.
As the country’s labor cost increased, the number of garments manufacturer decreased—most of them transferred operations in other Southeast Asian countries.
The garments industry as a whole is struggling to compete with secondhand clothes from developed countries, mostly sold also in flea markets, and Chinese-made garments and textiles. Factories in Taytay have also shut down, and those who stayed the course are heavily relying on imported remnants from China.
“The information gathered from the roundtable discussion is very important to us,” Rodolfo said. “As we go around the country and conduct similar focused-group discussions with garments and textile industry players and stakeholders, these collected information will serve as substantive inputs to the Garments and Textile Industry Roadmap that we envision for the industry.”
The BOI is drawing up a road map for the garments industry as part of the government’s overall manufacturing program. The road-mapping exercise involves defining the industry’s objectives, assessing its current situation and performance, identifying the binding constraints to its development and recommending strategies to achieve growth and competitiveness.
The BOI has engaged stakeholders since December of last year, and conducted five roundtable sessions with garment manufacturers in different parts of the country. The Rizal-based sewers were the sixth batch to be consulted.
Top exporter
The Philippines used to be a top exporter of garments, and was even the fifth in the world in 1995.
Since the MFA concluded, the country’s garment exports fell and was soon taken over by other Asian exporting economies, such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and China. Its decline reflected on the heavy contraction in the number of its workers.
In the early 1990s, the garments industry had over 300,000 factories and nearly 700,000 workers, including embroidery and piece-rated subcontracted laborers. In 2010 only 100,000 workers were left to produce for the industry.
The overdependence of garments makers on MFA quotas has caused the downfall of the garments industry. Industrial experts pointed to the failure of many aging textile firms to modernize, as well as the downfall of the World Bank-backed textile modernization program.
They also saw the lack of productive linkages between home-based sewers and the export-oriented garments industry as another cause of decline.
Last, Philippine garments makers were deemed unready for the World Bank-financed trade liberalization program of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Beyond the clinical analysis of all the factors behind the failure of what was once a thriving sector, those familiar with how things were in the olden days can only sigh in lamentation for the days when “dressing up” meant something much more than just mindlessly snatching clothes from a rack in some mall, or from stores for cheap, secondhand goods from abroad.