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Few countries rely on their textiles industry more than Honduras.
The original "Banana Republic", it is one of the poorest countries in the Americas, with an average per capita income of about $800 (€660, £435) per year.
But in the last decade, imaginative government incentives have combined with canny exploitation of trade concessions and the international quota system to create a large cluster of textile companies.
Industrial parks cluster around San Pedro Sula, the economic capital.
They were set up under the maquiladora model, first used in Mexico, whereby foreign suppliers could import components duty-free, for subsequent untaxed re-export. Apart from cheap labour, Honduras offered a generous tax package - no income tax, value-added tax or duties to be paid.
It also offered a relatively stable political background, unlike its neighbours El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, all convulsed by civil wars during the 1980s.
It could also offer convenience. A good highway allows access in barely 30 minutes to Puerto Cortés, Central America's biggest port, which developed to transport pineapples and bananas. From here, it is 22 hours to Miami.
International labour rights groups complain there are barriers to union recognition, to which Honduran officials reply that the sector's average wage of about $3,500 per year is more than four times the national average.
The "value added" by plants covered by the maquiladora scheme reached 6.5 per cent of Honduran gross domestic product in 2003.
The sector employs 114,000 people, or 30 per cent of the country's total formal industrial employment. The problem is the ending later this year of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement governing world quotas.
Employment has stayed steady during the first three phases of the lifting of quotas. However, about 80 per cent of Honduran garment production is simple products such as T-shirts, which are hardest to protect against low-cost producers, while 20 per cent of the industry's employment comes from Asian companies who first located there because of the quotas.
Honduras' response is the Central American Free Trade Agreement (Cafta), initialled by the US and five Central American countries this year. However, it faces what could be awkward progress through the US Congress.