Salvaging Jute

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THE government recently issued a directive of sorts urging everyone to use jute sacks to pack dry commodities like rice, wheat, flour, sugar and the like, in a bid to salvage the apparently ailing sector. It seems to have become something of a ritual for successive governments to talk about saving traditional jute goods or diversifying its use to keep pace with the times. However, those involved in developing this classic raw material into value-added products for export, complain that policy makers' words and the reality on the ground seldom match.
Nobody can deny that there is immense potential in the legendary golden fibre (like paper pulp from green jute and yarn for household linen, upholstery and even clothing), not to forget existing items like carpets, rugs and common hessein. Jute goods exporters claim there is no valid reason why the sector should be 'sick' as international demand for jute products is often found to be greater than the volume the mills here can deliver, despite production capacity. It is curious, they say, that on the one hand there is no end to the exhortation for non-traditional development of jute goods while on the other everything has been going on to discourage entrepreneurs who have proved modestly successful in developing new products that are commercially viable.
Jute floor coverings, for example -- mill-produced carpets, mats and hand-braided rugs -- have won selected markets on account of the fibre's environment-friendly qualities. It is biodegradable as well as fire-retardant. Yet policy-makers have been permitting the unimpeded import of synthetic floor coverings, and have also been taking a number of negative decisions that seemed to be designed to throttle the sector rather than revamp it. Instead of tackling the entrenched corruption and machinations of vested interest groups, that slowly but surely destroyed the Adamjee Jute Mills, for example, the Bangladesh government had chosen to go along with the prescription of the leading multilateral capital donor agency to kill off the largest jute corporation in the Asian continent, leaving hundreds of thousands of people, from fields to mills to markets at home and abroad, in the lurch. Even while the Adamjee was being prepared for the grave, across the border the same donor agency had fathered five or so new jute mills in India's West Bengal.
The policy-makers should put in a lot more thought into their decisions regarding the jute sector than they have done in the past. While serious efforts at research and development (R&D) are extremely important, it would all come to naught if concrete, commercially viable projects do not emerge out of these endeavours. Meanwhile, it would be worth the effort to attend to the already proven successes in the category of diversified products like floor coverings. Hand-braided rugs, modeled on the specifications of guaranteed foreign buyers, have been found to do very well and could be replicated once new buyers can be located. These products and similar innovations catering to current taste in the developed world certainly have a lot of potential both for poverty alleviation and foreign exchange earnings.
It should be kept in mind that this country of teeming millions benefits more from labour intensive small and medium projects than huge capital intensive ones that often fall prey to bureaucratic corruption and sick trade unionism, both trampling on the rights of ordinary workers when greed predominates. Therefore, manageable, market-oriented enterprises that really mean to do honest business, should be getting as much government support as possible. India, Nepal and Pakistan have a lot to offer in the way of practical lessons on small-scale, labour intensive ventures which are earning millions of dollars from export. Small will never cease to be beautiful for Bangladesh.