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The end of cheap clothes is near
Jorn Madslien, BBC News
Food prices have shot up in response to a surge in crop prices. Now consumers should get ready for clothes prices to follow suit.
Garment makers are seeing demand shrink as consumers in the US and Europe are cutting back on spending.
US cotton consumption is set to fall 6.5% from last year to less than a million tonnes whilst EU consumption is expected to fall 11% to about 460,000 tonnes, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts.
At the same time, they are hit by more expensive raw materials and by soaring oil prices, which make their factories more expensive to operate and which pushes up the cost of shipping to foreign markets.
In India, the weaving industry is in crisis. In China, the textile sector is squeezed.
And, yet again, the root cause of their problems can be found in America.
In the US, ever more cotton farmers are switching to more lucrative crops – soybeans, corn, and wheat – whose market prices are rising even faster.
(23 April 2008)
Contributor CP writes:
Peak cotton, what else have we missed?
The Joy of Socks
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
A while ago in Totnes we ran a course on sock darning. It felt to us like a very important skill to start retraining people in, and one of the many useful things the older generation could pass on to the younger. Although some people thought it a great idea, I did get a lot of ribbing about it (if you’ll excuse the knitting pun). However, in the subsequent months, sock darning has started to catch on. It’s the new salsa.
Our local wonderful organic clothing company, Greenfibres, recently put a great film about sock darning on YouTube (see below), which demystifies this most basic of arts so rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history.
(23 April 2008)
