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Industrial leaders urge removal of textile quotas
2004-07-27
China Daily
Textile industrial leaders are urging that global textile quotas between WTO members should be eliminated as scheduled.
They also dispelled the worry that Chinese textiles would flood the world and predicted foreign countries would return to other trade remedies to bar China's textiles.
Cao Xinyu, deputy director of the China Chamber of Commerce of Import and Export for Textiles, the largest organization in the field with more than 4,000 members, said members of the World Trade Organization should play by the rules, which were set a decade ago and said the quota should be eliminated by January 1, 2005.
"We all have agreed to the rules when entering the world trade body. If any country asks to revise the rule as soon as it finds difficulties in implementation, the world trade order would be a mess, which is not its aim," he said.
Some 90 textile trade associations around the world have been campaigning for months to have the WTO consider the negative impact the end of quotas will have on nations around the world and trying to delay their elimination.
They are also lobbying their governments to make a formal request to the WTO for convening an emergency meeting over the impact of the textile liberalization.
They predicted that when quotas end, China will dominate the textile market at a cost of about 30 million jobs around the world.
Cao said the forecast lacks logic and it is impossible for China to flood the world textiles market.
China currently stands at the low- and middle-end of the line of textile products.
"If China expands at its current rate, namely expanding by quantity, after the quota elimination, it would create a huge demand for cotton and drive up the cost of cotton imports," Cao said.
Surging prices would blunt China's edge in terms of cheap and large quantities of textile goods and push foreign buyers to other countries, he said.
And if China wants to move higher, it will naturally give up the low end to other countries such as Pakistan, Viet Nam and Bangladesh.
Some Chinese textile companies are moving to invest in developing countries as China's labour costs rise, assistant minister of commerce Yi Xiaozhun said at a forum recently.
Yi said that the domestic firms hoped to alleviate concerns about China's dominant role in the global textile trade through such investments in view of the quota expiration by the year-end.
"Liberalization or integration of textiles into the multilateral trading system will happen soon. I understand there are some concerns by some developing countries about China's export of textiles," Yi said.
"You will see outward investment from China going up in the textile sector and we hope that can help developing countries," he said.
Still, no countries have voiced their support for delaying the quota elimination.
In June, the Bush administration rejected an appeal from more than 130 Republican and Democrat members of Congress who had asked it to persuade the WTO to delay scrapping textiles and garment quotas.
But Sun Huaibing, an official from the China Textile Industry Association, says signs indicate that these countries will return to other ways, such as safeguards, to bar the free flow of textiles.
The Bush administration recently launches an investigation on sock imports from China, after US producers last month filed a petition under a specific safeguard.
A few days ago, EU's top textile association Euratex also urged EU authorities to make a wider use of the China textile safeguard, especially on the EU's imports of polyester filament fabrics.
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