DHAKA, Oct 6: Bangladesh’s garment exports were down nearly a quarter in July as political turmoil and labour unrest wreaked havoc on the sector, which is crucial to the impoverished nation’s economy, data showed.

Bangladesh exported garments worth $692 million in July, down almost 24 per cent from the same month a year earlier, the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association said on Saturday.

“We’ve had months of political turmoil and labour unrest since the middle of last year, which prompted the top global buyers to place export orders elsewhere,” association president Anwarul Alam Chowdhury Parvez said.

“We couldn’t escape it (the slowdown),” Chowdhury told AFP.

For the first seven months of this calendar year, exports totalled $5.17 billion, virtually unchanged from last year’s total of $5.11 billion during the same period.

Garment export growth in the January to July period slowed sharply to 1.27 per cent from 16 per cent in the same period in 2006.

The sector has been buffeted by labour unrest since mid-2006 over low wages and poor working conditions.

And Bangladesh was rocked last year by months of violent street protests and nationwide strikes over vote-rigging allegations.

The violence, which continued until a military-backed emergency government took over on January 12, claimed at least 35 lives with major businesses, factories and ports forced to shut down for weeks at a time.

Elections were cancelled and the new government has pledged to hold fresh polls by late 2008 after cleaning up the country’s corrupt politics.

The government has compiled a list of 220 top corruption suspects. The suspects, who are mainly politicians and businessmen, include leading garment exporters. Some 150 of the suspects have been detained.

“Business confidence in the country has been down since the interim government launched its anti-graft crackdown,” economist professor Mustafizur Rahman, Bangladesh’s leading trade expert, said.

“Some big businessmen have already been arrested over suspected links to corruption. Naturally this also hit the confidence in garment manufacturers,” he said.

The top trade body, Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, has complained that a “climate of fear” caused by the corruption crackdown has dampened domestic investment and hit business confidence.

Garment exports make up three-quarters of Bangladesh’s more than $12 billion in annual export earnings and are regarded as an economic lifeline for the poverty-hit South Asian nation.The garment sector has more than 4,200 factories employing millions of workers.

Garment exports nearly doubled in four years, hitting $9.2 billion in the financial year to June 2007. They totalled $4.9 billion in 2003.

Exports of knitwear items such as T-shirts and sweaters, which in the past four years grew more than 25 per cent annually, posted just 2.41 per cent growth in the first seven months of the year, the association said.

—AFP