If they have socket functions enabled then you can use a pure PHP based FTP client.
A quick google gives
Class: Advanced FTP client class (ftp, socket, ftp class, sockets) - PHP Classes I've not tried it but there are others about. It's not that hard to write a pure PHP FTP client.
If you just want to pull data from the remote server then you could try using curl functions (
PHP: cURL - Manual) to read the data as you would a web page, however remember that data is publicly available unless you password protect it.