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Textile and Apparel Groups Ask U.S. for China Monitoring Program
September 19, 2008

Textile and apparel groups from 17 countries recently asked the U.S. to implement an import monitoring program for China beginning Jan. 1, 2009, the date on which existing U.S. safeguard quotas on shipments from China expire. The Bush administration currently maintains such a program for imports from Vietnam and regularly reviews the data collected to determine whether it should self-initiate antidumping proceedings against any of the covered products.

In Sept. 11 letters to the senior leaders of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, the groups said a similar effort is necessary with respect to China “to ensure that China does not devastate and overrun our vital textile and apparel export markets when the current safeguards expire.” The letters pointed out that the last time the U.S. eliminated quotas on China in early 2005 “Chinese prices dropped 40 percent and its apparel exports to the U.S. increased by more than 600 percent.” In apparel products where quotas have already been eliminated, China’s market share “has risen from 13 percent to nearly 60 percent in only a few years time.” The groups said they fear a similar situation once the remaining quotas are lifted, citing increases in the range and scope of subsidies offered to the Chinese textile industry as evidence that China could “again seek to drive our sectors out of business.”

In contrast, the letters said, extending the textile monitoring program to China would help prevent a surge of imports from China and protect over one million jobs in Africa, Central America, the Middle East, the Andean region and Mexico. The groups asserted that the current safeguards have preserved $37 billion worth of exports of shirts, trousers, underwear and other products from their countries and helped keep China’s share of the U.S. market to 16 percent.