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Like everywhere else, in Iraq the local shoe making industry is under threat from Chinese imports. There are some other difficulties too.
A Report in The New York Times, April 15, 2008
Devising Survival at Factory in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD - Before April 2003, when the maze of crooked lanes that branch away from Rasheed Street downtown were crammed with hundreds of small leather goods factories, Hassan Attiya, now 43, designed fancy women's shoes under his signature "Cowboy" label. And his workers manufactured and sold them by the thousands.
Now Mr. Attiya, humbled by security fears, the shuttering of Iraqi tanning factories that provided his raw materials and an avalanche of cheap imports from China and Syria since the invasion, hangs on in a crumbling former dentist's office with a handful of workers.
If all that were not crushing enough, as widespread violence generated by fighting in the south last month forced Mr. Attiya to close his factory, policemen in Baghdad stopped a car carrying goods he had ordered from Syria. The policemen said they were looking for weaponry, but when the search was over a package containing good-quality faux diamonds for his shoes had vanished. It was worth $1,200, perhaps a quarter of Mr. Attiya's working capital.
"Wallahi," Mr. Attiya said in an Arabic expression of woe. "The business is not as it used to be. It is like the survival of the fittest."
Still, as grim as Mr. Attiya's fate has been, there is also a gleam of light to be found in his Darwinian metaphor: surrounded this month in his reopened factory by piles of mauve, green, silver, white, gold and black leather shoes with flamboyant curves, in-your-face spike heels and whimsical trimmings, he has somehow survived as a private businessman.
And in the shoe business, at least, Mr. Attiya is not alone, surprisingly, after all the devastation and upheaval in Iraq since 2003, although he says that he has received no help whatever from his seemingly oblivious government or from the Americans.
Nearly all of those leather goods factories closed in 2003, but now there are signs that some of them - probably no more than 5 to 10 percent, but still accounting for thousands of jobs - have adapted, sometimes in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Security improvements after the American troop increase last year have helped by making customers more comfortable in some of the markets and allowing sales representatives and delivery vans to travel outside Baghdad.
"It was good for my business," said Muhamad al-Sudani, acting director and general manager at the Marakish shoe and slipper factory. But he added: "It is not as good as it used to be before 2003. Never. I don't expect that."
Still, conversations with several dozen workers, managers and owners suggest that more than any other factors, persistence and good old entrepreneurial opportunism is what has allowed the local shoe business to maintain its presence.
Majid Mishari, the owner of Marakish, said he could not open his factory's doors at all in 2003 or 2004, and when he tried starting up again for a few months in 2005, thieves or insurgents in the Anbar desert intercepted a $45,000 shipment of leather from Syria.
But Mr. Mishari, who loves his factory's shoes so much that he is given to picking one up and tenderly kissing it, kept at it. He managed to stay open for six months in 2006. And since security began improving early in 2007, he has been open continuously.
If Iraq were fully at peace tomorrow, though, Mr. Mishari would still literally be paying for the violence that has shaken his country for so long. He throws open cabinet after cabinet filled with stacks of what he says are unpaid invoices: many of them are for orders sent to shop owners who were killed or disappeared, or used the war as an excuse for not sending payment, he said.
So Mr. Mishari has improvised, managing to get a rare bank loan for 100 million dinars, about $80,000, and is preparing to sell his house in the Karada neighborhood if his revenues do not allow him to make the payments.
In the old days - hardly a golden era, given the crippling Western economic sanctions against Iraq - demand for his products seemed endless, and cash flowed in accordingly, Mr. Mishari said. "Now," he added, "I just want to know the smell of a $100 bill."
http://nytimes.com/
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