WASHINGTON (AFX) - The US textiles industry called for new WTO curbs to prevent China wiping out the rest of the world's fabric and clothes production in a few years.
While welcoming a newly agreed textiles trade deal between China and the United States, US industry leaders said the booming Asian country's 'unfair trade practices' had not gone away.
In a conference call with reporters, they highlighted what they called China's 'manipulation' of its exchange rate, its alleged subsidies to manufacturers and loans extended by state-owned banks to its companies at low or no interest.
Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, called on the US and other textile exporters to come together at the World Trade Organization's current Doha round of talks.
'We cannot allow the biggest player on the block ... also to have these enormous state-sponsored advantages and then expect there's going to be orderly trade in this sector,' he said.
Tantillo said that in the Uruguay round of world trade talks, which concluded in 1994, developing countries with textiles industries were unanimous in calling for an end to rich nations' quotas.
But he said China's stellar rise has been an 'eye-opening experience' for those countries, 'who recognize that quota elimination means China gets nearly everything, India the rest and almost everybody else is put of business'.
The US agreement provides for a progressive increase in Chinese textile imports until 2008, but would still cap their growth at far less than seen this year.
After 2008, the textiles trade will become a free-for-all as permitted under China's accession agreement with the WTO. In the meantime, US textile manufacturers have three years to come up with new strategies to survive.
'This does not solve the problem. It only pushes the danger from China farther off,' said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organisations.
A solution to the host of US industry complaints against China will not happen in three years, he said.
Johnson called for the WTO textile negotiations to be placed in a separate sectoral chapter so that new safeguard arrangements can be enacted after 2008.
