*This video was recorded last week, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip.
There have been significant protests in Bangladesh over a law reserving a significant portion of government jobs for supporters of the 1971 independence revolution and their descendants. The job quota has been suspended, but protests continue.
For context, Bangladesh has a young population of over 100 million and accounts for nearly a tenth of the global textile supply. The current protests revolve around the chokehold on opportunities that this job quota has caused, forcing many college grads into low-wage textile jobs or something of similar stature.
The protestors have been met with curfews, arrests and worse, but it appears they will continue to push back against the government. Depending on the resolution of these protests, the Bangladeshi textile sector could be in trouble…which would be amplified by the technological advances hitting the industry.
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Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re talking about a country we hardly ever talk about, and that is Bangladesh. There are nationwide protests going on there right now. At least 20 people have been killed, and the protesters are literally saying that they’re trying to shut down the country, and they’re doing a pretty good job.
For those of you who don’t know what Bangladesh is, it’s a small, physically small country kind of nestled into the armpit of India, to the northeast of Delhi. It’s that little chunk that kind of wraps around India, and Bangladesh is there at the mouth of the Ganges, right in the Bay of Bengal.
It’s got a huge population, very young, over 100 million people. And it is textile central. As China moved out of textiles, or at least out of mass market textiles over the last 20 years, Bangladesh has picked it all up. Now, roughly 20% of textile supply chains involve Bangladesh in some way, and really 8% of global supply comes from there.
Anyway, the protesters are attempting to do nothing less than overthrow the constitutional order of the country. So, you know, kind of a big deal. The short version is that back when Bangladesh got independence in 1971, one of the founding laws for the country was that roughly 30% of all government jobs, regardless of what they are, were guaranteed to go to people who supported or fought in the revolution in the first place, or their families and descendants.
Well, that has basically given some very, very politically connected people a chokehold over government contracts and jobs. And if you are, say, a college graduate in Bangladesh, your options are to try to compete for what’s left. You can go into the textile industry and be a wage slave, or you can work on a beach breaking old ships, and that’s it.
That is the entire economy of Bangladesh. So there are several millions of people who are skilled and kind of have no prospects whatsoever because, you know, Bangladesh. You can walk to maybe India, but Indian labor laws aren’t exactly welcoming for migrants, just like most countries where migrants are a portion of the workforce. So they’re trying to shut the whole place down.
Now, this is both not a big deal and a very big deal. There’s nothing magical about textiles, especially when you’re talking about the relatively low tech level that the Bangladeshis do. However, the integration of textiles, typically a garment, especially things that involve a lot of stitching and maybe something sewn on or stamped in, like a button or a rivet, involves a dozen different countries.
And if you have a significant disruption within what is actually the single biggest node in the world, any number of supply chains are simply going to break completely. It’s not that they can’t be repaired. It’s not that they can’t be rerouted. But none of that can happen quickly because Bangladesh really has emerged as the singular node. So we’ve got a lot of cheesed-off college graduates who are basically trying to overthrow what is like one step removed from the constitutional order of the country.
And no matter how this goes down, we’re looking at disruption in global textiles for at least the next couple of years. For those of you who have been watching China, there are a couple of interesting years upcoming. As the Chinese system hits the skids and the second-largest concentration of textiles has problems, in the background, we have a change technologically in how textiles are being done, which is undermining both the Bangladeshi and the Chinese systems, specifically here in the United States.
We figured out a way to automate a lot of the process and take everything from raw cotton to turn it into thread and yarn, turn it to cloth, cut it into sections, and all of that is now cheaper than what goes on in Bangladesh. We’re probably only a few years away from actually being able to stitch the clothes together into a semi-finished process and make that cheaper as well.
So this is the economic sector that matters in the country, and this is potentially the next big source of outmigration as this sector fails. Anyway, what’s going on right now with the protests could simply make it fail faster.
