Fleur Britten’s excellent article highlights the damage done to Ghana’s environment by our supposedly generous dumping on it of our discarded clothing (Where does the UK’s fast fashion end up? I found out on a beach clean in Ghana, 24 September). However, she misses out another form of damage: the undercutting of the indigenous clothing industry.
Ghana can and does make clothes for local sale – cheap by our standards, but less so for the locals. Unless working in a public-facing environment, why should any Ghanaian, say in manual work, pay relatively high prices for new clothes when they can go down to the nearest market or “bend-down boutique” (where secondhand clothes are laid out flat on a vacant piece of land – usually by the side of a road), and get a perfectly serviceable shirt or pair of shorts for a tenth of the price?
