Under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, hundreds of women bend over sewing machines and ironing boards amid piles of brightly coloured cloth.
Almost 25 000 t-shirts roll off the Shining Century production line each day, destined for store shelves at the Gap and Old Navy outlets in the United States.
The rapid growth of factories like these has made this tiny mountain kingdom a poster child for a three-and-a-half year-old United States trade law aimed at encouraging economic development in Africa by dropping tariffs on many products exported to the United States.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act, known as AGOA, has given Lesotho a competitive edge over textile manufacturing countries elsewhere in the world, like Taiwan and India, helping it lure investment and create jobs.
As business and political leaders debate how to encourage growth on the troubled continent at a World Economic Forum summit in nearby Mozambique, Lesotho is quietly counting its successes.
Since AGOA came into effect in October 2000, more than 35 000 new textile jobs have been created in Lesotho, one of the world’s poorest countries. Though home to fewer than two-million people, the country is Africa’s eighth-largest exporter to the United States and produced 31% of the textiles exported from here to the United States under the Act last year.
But those jobs come at a price: hard work for little pay, rapid urbanisation and the attendant growth of slums, prostitution, crime and Aids.
Key provisions of AGOA expire in September, and the US Congress is currently debating whether to renew them. In Lesotho, while everyone from manufacturers to government to trade unions say they want the textile boom to continue, there is growing concern about the costs of industrialisation.
”If AGOA is extended, it will create more jobs. If not, the companies will cut and run,” predicted Shaw Lebakae, deputy secretary-general of the Lesotho Clothing and Allied Workers Union, one of two textile unions. ”We want the factories to stay, but we want them to pay a living wage and to uphold good labour practices.”
Mphonyane Motseki (23) spends her days cutting fabric for US-bound t-shirts and her nights in a tiny, one room house at the back of a yard that reeks of raw sewage.
Almost half her monthly salary of about $100 is sent to help her parents and siblings in a village in Lesotho’s mountains. At the end of the month, after long hours on the factory floor, there is little left over for even the smallest of luxuries.
”It’s not good at all,” she said, as she walked home. ”But all people want that job because there is nothing else.”
Foreign companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the country, and the two main industrial areas in the capital, Maseru, are booming.
But most of the new textile workers are like Motseki — poor, young women who continue to live in abject poverty. The country’s two unions call the factories sweatshops.
US officials say the jobs are a necessary first step in the country’s development. In Lesotho — as in America, Asia and Europe — they say textile work will create new wealth and eventually help pull the country up the economic ladder.
”What AGOA has done for Lesotho is to open a door,” said Robert Loftis, US ambassador to Lesotho. ”The thing about AGOA is that it’s not an aid programme, it’s a trade programme. It’s helping to bring them into the international trade system.”
But industrialisation and urbanisation have also brought new challenges to largely rural, conservative Lesotho. At night in once sleepy Maseru the streets teem with prostitutes — many of them young girls drawn to the city’s factories, but who can’t find work there.
Aids is booming among prostitutes and young textile workers. In one factory that offers free testing and counseling, a quarter of those tested were found to be HIV-positive.
While 37 African countries have qualified for favourable trade status under AGOA, Lesotho is one of only a handful that have succeeded in increasing exports. Economic growth in many African countries continues to be hampered by corruption, poor infrastructure, lack of capital and other problems.
Even Lesotho’s success, however, is threatened by the expiration of a provision of the act that allows the continent’s poorest countries to export textiles duty-free, even if the cloth used is imported from elsewhere. Textiles from richer African countries like South Africa only qualify under AGOA if they use cloth made in Africa or the United States.
”If we cannot buy fabric from the Far East, we will definitely lose business,” said Jennifer Chen, manager of Shining Century and head of the Lesotho Textile Exporters Association. ”There’s just not enough fabric produced in Africa, and what there is is too expensive.”
That’s a frightening prospect for workers like Motseki, who says any job is better than none.
”I can’t say now that we are poor or rich; we are in the middle,” she said. ”But if I lost my job, we would be hungry again.” – Sapa-AP