For decades, Ismail Temorzada’s handmade Afghan carpets decorated people’s homes around the world, but export problems and competition from Iran’s machine-made products have left his business threadbare.
“My carpet sales are down, no one is buying handmade carpets anymore,” says Temorzada, 45, who has run a shop for more than 20 years in Kabul’s once crowded and colorful Chicken Street bazaar.
“Iranian machine-made carpets are imported to Afghanistan at a cheaper price,” he said, dismissing them as lacking originality, durability and charm.
Photo: AFP
However, they are cheap and people buy them, and his sales have dropped by 70 percent over the past year, he says. Carpets are Afghanistan’s best-known export, woven mostly by women in the north of the country.
Displaying his best carpets, from Andkhoy in northern Faryab Province, Temorzada said they cost 60,000 Afghanis (US$1,240), but nobody is buying them now.
He wants the government to ban the importation of machine-made carpets from Iran — or at least impose a steep increase in the import duty.
“Recently, Afghan carpet businessmen had a meeting with [Afghan] President Hamid Karzai and the president told us that if we ban their carpets then they will ban all their products to Afghanistan,” Temorzada said. “If we cannot ban the Iranian machine-made carpets we should increase the duty on the product from [US]$10 a meter to [US]$100, so that they cannot be imported to Afghanistan in great numbers and slowly will be reduced.”
Temorzada also wants the government of the landlocked and wartorn country to help the industry export its own products directly to clients around the world.
At the moment, transport problems mean that most carpets are sent to neighboring Pakistan for washing and cutting and are often then shipped abroad under Pakistani labels.
Afghan carpet making used to employ directly or indirectly 6 million people, or a fifth of the country’s population, according to the export promotion agency of Afghanistan — but that figure has dropped sharply.
“The Afghan carpet industry is totally dependent on the international market,” said Mohammad Zarif Yadgari, deputy director of the Afghan Carpet Exporters’ Guild. “There is no direct access [to sell] abroad — if we export carpets they will be sent abroad from Pakistan through middlemen.”
The value of carpet exports fell from US$262 million in 2007 to US$149 million in 2008, according to the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries.
In 2010, nearly 400,000m2 of carpets worth US$48 million were sold, but this dropped by half last year. However, while some businesses suffer, others are thriving.
“Since I brought Iranian machine-made carpets, my business has boomed,” Kabul carpet dealer Mohammad Muzamil Yousufzai said. “Because they are cheap and are sold at a reasonable price, everyone can afford to buy them.”
The Afghan government says it is making moves to help local carpet makers.
“The government has started work on the construction of industrial parks for carpet businessmen for washing and scissoring,” said Motasil Komaki, Afghan deputy commerce and industries minister.
Describing carpets as “Afghanistan’s national industry,” he said the parks would initially be built in four provinces — Faryab, Balkh, Herat and Jawzjan.
Weaving carpets was a main source of income for the millions of Afghans who fled to Pakistan during Afghanistan’s years of war, notably the 1990s civil conflict that was followed by Taliban rule. About 80 percent of the exiles have returned home since the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001 and now a large portion of Pakistan’s carpets are made in Afghanistan, but sold as Pakistani, according to government figures.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, can ill afford to lose its main industry. Its economy has been supported by huge infusions of Western cash for the past decade as 130,000 US-led NATO troops help Karzai’s government fight a Taliban insurgency.
The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s, are as you might expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator. Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after a landslide presidential victory by Marcos Jr, he is facing calls to stop misrepresenting the circumstances of his studies at the University of Oxford. The university has confirmed that he did not complete his degree in philosophy, politics and economics after enrolling in 1975. “According to our records, he did
CALIBRATED RESPONSE: The city-state has learned from its past experiences of dealing with COVID-19 variants to assess the situation and the risks, the transport minister said Singapore will strive to keep its borders open and stay connected to the rest of world even if a new variant of COVID-19 emerges, Singaporean Minister for Transport S. Iswaran said on Wednesday. The city-state has learned from its past experiences of dealing with COVID-19 variants, Iswaran said in an interview with Bloomberg News. When the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 hit, Singapore did not backtrack on its reopening plans, but rather decided to wait and see how things panned out, he said, adding that the response was different versus the Delta outbreak. “We’ve all learned to adapt,” Iswaran said on the sidelines
Administrators at an elite Beijing university have backed down from plans to further tighten restrictions on students as part of China’s “zero COVID-19” strategy after a weekend protest at the school, students said on Tuesday. Graduate students at Peking University staged the protest on Sunday over the school’s decision to erect a sheet-metal wall to keep them further sequestered on campus, while allowing faculty to come and go freely. Discontent had already been simmering over regulations prohibiting them from ordering in food or having visitors, and daily COVID-19 testing. A citywide lockdown of Shanghai and expanded restrictions in Beijing in the past few
A former Australian envoy to the Solomon Islands has accused Australia’s government of losing the trust of South Pacific island countries and of ushering in greater Chinese influence. Retired career diplomat Trevor Sofield told a security summit yesterday that he found it “inconceivable” that the Solomon Islands government did not trust Australia enough to consult with it when a bilateral security pact with Beijing was first considered. “That would not have happened a few years ago,” said Sofield, who was Australian high commissioner to the Solomon Islands from 1982 to 1985. The pact, which was concluded last month, has been a major issue
RSS