BY CHARLES KENNY
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The Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas. In parts of the developing world, however, an alternate reality exists: "Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl XLV Champions" appears emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of Steelers die-hards, but recipients of the many thousands of excess shirts the National Football League produced to anticipate the post-game merchandising frenzy. Each year, the NFL donates the losing team's shirts to the charity World Vision, which then ships them off to developing countries to be handed out for free. Everyone wins, right? The NFL offloads 100,000 shirts (and hats and sweatshirts) that can't be sold -- and takes the donation as a tax break. World Vision gets clothes to distribute at no cost. And some Nicaraguans and Zambians get a free shirt. What's not to like? Quite a lot, as it happens -- so much so that there's even a Twitter hashtag, #SWEDOW, for "Stuff We Don't Want," to track such developed-world offloading, whether it's knit teddy bears for kids in refugee camps, handmade puppets for orphans, yoga mats for Haiti, or dresses made out of pillowcases for African children. The blog Tales from the Hood, run by an anonymous aid worker, even set up a SWEDOW prize, won by Knickers 4 Africa, a (thankfully now defunct) British NGO set up a couple of years ago to send panties south of the Sahara.

Here's the trouble with dumping stuff we don't want on people in need: What they need is rarely the stuff we don't want. And even when they do need that kind of stuff, there are much better ways for them to get it than for a Western NGO to gather donations at a suburban warehouse, ship everything off to Africa or South America, and then try to distribute it to remote areas. World Vision, for example, spends 58 cents per shirt on shipping, warehousing, and distributing them, according to data reported by the blog Aid Watch -- well within the range of what a secondhand shirt costs in a developing country. Bringing in shirts from outside also hurts the local economy: Garth Frazer of the University of Toronto estimates that increased used-clothing imports accounted for about half of the decline in apparel industry employment in Africa between 1981 and 2000. Want to really help a Zambian? Give him a shirt made in Zambia. The mother of all swedow is the $2 billion-plus U.S. food aid program, a boondoggle that lingers on only because of the lobbying muscle of agricultural conglomerates. (Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was when the United States airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts on Afghanistan in January 2002.) Harvard University's Nathan Nunn and Yale University's Nancy Qian have shown that the scale of U.S. food aid isn't strongly tied to how much recipient countries actually require it -- but it does rise after a bumper crop in the American heartland, suggesting that food aid is far more about dumping American leftovers than about sending help where help's needed. And just like secondhand clothing, castoff food exports can hurt local economies. Between the 1980s and today, subsidized rice exports from the United States to Haiti wiped out thousands of local farmers and helped reduce the proportion of locally produced rice consumed in the country from 47 to 15 percent. Former President Bill Clinton concluded that the food aid program "may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked.… I had to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did."
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Bottom line: Donations of cash are nearly always more effective. Even if there are good reasons to give stuff rather than money, in most cases the stuff can be bought locally. Economist Amartya Sen, for example, has conclusively shown that people rarely die of starvation or malnutrition because of a lack of food in the neighborhood or the country. Rather, it is because they can't afford to buy the food that's available. Yet, as Connie Veillette of the Center for Global Development reports, shipping U.S. food abroad in response to humanitarian disasters is so cumbersome it takes four to six months to get there after the crisis begins. Buying food locally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found, would be 25 percent cheaper and considerably faster, too. In some cases, if there really is a local shortage and the goods really are needed urgently, the short-term good done by clothing or food aid may well outweigh any long-term costs in terms of local development. But if people donate swedow, they may be less likely to give much-needed cash. A study by Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan, for example, suggests that charitable giving may be lower among consumers who buy cause-related products because they feel they've already done their part. Philanthrocapitalism may be chic: The company Toms Shoes has met with considerable commercial success selling cheap footwear with the added hook that for each pair you buy, the company gives a pair to a kid in the developing world (it's sold more than a million pairs to date). But what if consumers are buying Toms instead of donating to charity, as some surely are? Much better to stop giving them the stuff we don't want -- and start giving them the money they do.
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By EDMUND DeMARCHE
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Ten truckloads of confiscated knockoff duds destined for the scrap heap will get a new life on the backs of Haiti earthquake victims, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said yesterday. "I feel wonderful," said Hynes, standing in Red Hook by the trucks preparing to carry an estimated 125,000 tons of illegal threads worth $10 million. "It's a celebration -- certainly not a traditional prosecution."
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The goods, sporting fake labels for such high-end companies as Nike, Ed Hardy, True Religion, Antik Denim, Diesel, Jordan, Rocawear, Ralph Lauren, Christian Audigier and Affliction, were confiscated from a Sunset Park storage facility in a 2009 raid.
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Ordinarily, seized knockoffs are destroyed. But Hynes' office said the law allows goods to be reused if fake labels are removed and a tougher hurdle is cleared: The maker of the real-deal goods agrees.
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"It wasn't easy," said Rackets Division Chief Michael Vecchione. "But when we explained what we'd use the clothes for, they came on board." The relief organization World Vision in Pennsylvania will remove the goods' tags before shipping them out

Please do not donate clothes to Haiti. It is not needed. Instead, please consider a fundraiser for organizations responding to the immediate needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) of Haitians affected by the earthquake. Your clothes will get caught in the customs and take up valuable space needed for life-saving commodities right now. Email me if you need more information. Thanks.

My Drama students have collected several hundred pounds of clothing for our yard sale fundraisers. In light of what is happening in Haiti, we have decided to donate all the clothing to the Haitian people, but are unaware of how to get the clothing to the people. Can you help with suggestions?

We are a small rural high school along the west shores of the Salton Sea in Southern California. We do not have funds to ship the clothing directly. Given the urgency of the situation, a rapid reply would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your support.

Kindly,
Sam Messler
Teacher
West Shores High School
2381 Shore Hawk Avenue
Salton City, CA 92275
Office 760-394-4331
Cell 760-799-3790
samuel.messler@cvusd.us

Secondhand (Pepe) Now Available

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In this documentary about used clothing, the historical memoir of a Jewish immigrant rag picker intertwines with the present-day story of 'pepe' - secondhand clothing that flows from North America to Haiti. Secondhand (Pepe) animates the materiality of recycled clothes - their secret afterlives and the unspoken connections among people in an era of globalization.

In the early 1900s, immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe collected, sorted, and sold secondhand clothing. As the Jewish peddlers made their way through North American city streets, they called out 'Rags, Bones, Bottles!' Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the used clothing industry has gone global. Billions of pounds go to developing nations each year. Used American clothes play an especially central role in Haiti where, as one peddler reveals, 'It's all pepe, all the time.'

Dreamlike visuals and ethereal sounds intermix the beats of Jewish klezmer and Haitian rara music. Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons) has composed the soundtrack of the film with an artful and nuanced ear, emphasizing the ruptures and looped connections among diasporic cultures. Secondhand (Pepe)'s two stories converge as American castoffs travel from the Jewish memoir reader's rag factory to the Haitian shores. As pepe makes its way to Port-au-Prince, passing through an intricate network of peddlers, seamstresses and entrepreneurs, the past recycles into the present.
Hanna R. Shell & Vanessa Bertozzi | documentary | 24 minutes | 2007 | $175 | discounts available for high schools, public libraries and community organizations

"Weaving the old with the new, the past with the present, the local with the global, and the social with the economic, Shell and Bertozzi have created a stylistically compelling and thought provoking tapestry of a film, providing first-hand insight into the history and culture of secondhand clothing."
- Alan Berliner, Filmmaker

"An imaginative rendering of the ways dispossessed peoples make use of the discarded clothing of a dominant culture. The film makes wonderful use of sound design, live action, old movies, and a Chris Marker-esque belief in the interconnectedness of things to show us how the forgotten clothes in one culture re-surface as fashion opportunities in another. Traveling along an energetic and associative editing scheme, the film not only tracks the secondhand clothing business, but gently allows us to think about the ways the past is re-cycled into the present, especially how detritus from the first world is worn into the imaginative fabric of the third world. A compelling piece of filmmaking."
- Robb Moss, Filmmaker

Best Student Documentary, Brooklyn Arts Council Film Festival, 2007
Best Musical Score, Rhode Island International Film Festival, 2007

Slamdance Film Festival, 2008
Black Maria Film Festival, 2007
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, 2008

TWN is supported in part by The New York State Council on the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Ford Foundation, The North Star Fund and The Funding Exchange, as well as individual donors.
email: twn@twn.org
phone: 212.947.9277
web: http://www.twn.org

TWN is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering the creation, appreciation, and dissemination of independent media by and about people of color.