Spinning threads of progress.

• Author: Ambrus, Steven
• Position: Silk production in Colombia

At the entrance to a long, concrete shed surrounded by high; green mulberry bushes, Kee Wook Sohn dons Chinese slippers. He skirts a narrow, wooden tub squirming with fat, white silkworms, passes a room of Colombian scientists, and glides towards a climate-controlled chamber stacked with large, glass incubators. "We've developed one hybrid of silkworm here, ideal for Colombia's tropical climate, and we'll soon have another that will produce even more silk," he says. "The proof will be in the spinning."

Sohn, a longtime Korean silk expert, is in Colombia's coffee zone, on a mission. As agricultural research director for Cokosilk, a Pereira-based silk company, he sees radical changes ahead in the world silk market and is eager to transform Colombia into an international silk power. He is incorrigibly upbeat. As he crosses Japanese and Chinese silkworms to generate new hybrids for Colombia's tropical conditions, he is confident he is laying the foundations for a world-class industry.

"Korea and Japan are vastly reducing their production, and China, the number one producer, is incapable of taking up the slack," he says. "Soon there will be excess demand, and Colombia will have an unequaled opportunity to establish itself as an international player."

Rising labor costs and land shortages have badly hurt Japan and Korea, the world's third- and sixth-ranking raw-silk producers, Sohn explains. They are expected to drop out of the market within the next five years. Colombia, with the world's best soil and climatic conditions for silk, could easily fill the breach. The country could be selling US$100 million in silk annually within five to ten years, experts predict.

Chon Won Ho, the new Korean factory director of Cokosilk, is ebullient. After more than thirty years' experience as a silk technician in Korea, Indonesia, India, and Malaysia, he looks ahead to boom times for the new silk nation. "Colombia has the world's best natural conditions for silk production and a cheap, qualified labor force. There is no doubt that it could become one of the world's biggest exporters of silk," he says.

Silk, first produced more than four thousand years ago in China and dubbed the royal "Queen of Fibers," is a traditional Asian luxury, coveted for centuries for its sleek and sensuous texture. First shipped from China to India around 140 B.C. and then to Persia in the second century A.D., sericulture, or the actual production of raw silk, reached Europe after the Crusades. It then thrived during the Renaissance in Italy and France. But a silkworm plague in the mid-nineteenth century devastated European production. And over the last hundred years, sericulture has remained predominantly an Asian craft, dominated by China, India, and Japan.

But that is changing. Silk is planting new roots in...