Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-07-Speech-4-042"
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"en.20050707.5.4-042"2
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".
Mr President, I thank Mrs Saïfi for her timely report and believe that the end of the Multifibre Agreement poses a very great challenge to a great many countries around the world. The World Bank and the World Trade Organization predict that as a result of the abolition of all quotas China’s share of world trade in textiles and clothing will rise from 17% in 2003 to over 50% by 2010.
Some argue that to date China’s imports have mostly grown at the expense of imports from other third countries which have seen their share of the EU market decrease, but it is already very clear that the EU textile and clothing industry is experiencing significant pressure. According to the European apparel and textile organisation, Eurotex, the sector could risk losing 1 000 jobs a day and up to a million jobs before the end of 2006.
I welcome the steps that the Commission has finally taken to address the problem but I wonder what makes them so confident that a few years’ breathing space will really make any long-term difference. Since the sector in the EU has already had ten years in which to make adaptations to this new reality, what more will they do in the next few years that they have not already done? My concern in saying that is that the Commission is underestimating the size of the challenge we face.
Its response has been to urge European manufacturers to produce higher-value products rather than competing with China on basics, yet China’s ability to climb rapidly the value-added ladder across so many sectors shows how unhelpful this advice is.
The Commission has also failed to acknowledge that this challenge is a systemic one, not a one-off sectoral one. The textile sector is likely to be only the first sector among many. As Mr Karim has just said, we already know that there are many other sectors that are about to cause us concern in terms of Chinese competition. I am thinking of footwear, bicycles, machine components, and also high-tech goods. But if the impact in the EU will be severe, in many parts of the developing world it will be devastating, especially for women who are disproportionately represented in these sectors.
In 2000 textiles and clothing accounted for 95% of all Bangladesh’s industrial goods exports. In Laos they accounted for 93%, Cambodia 83%, Pakistan 73%, the list goes on. The sector employed nearly 2 million workers in Bangladesh, 1.4 million workers in Pakistan. Little wonder, then, that several dozen countries led by Bangladesh and Mauritius made an eleventh hour appeal to the World Trade Organization to save their textile industries. It is very unfortunate that their appeal fell on deaf ears, because China’s deflationary pressures are already driving down wages, pushing global suppliers to reduce their workers’ rights and conditions in a bid to remain competitive.
In the Philippines, for example, the government has ruled that its law on the minimum wage will no longer apply to the clothing industry. The Bangladeshi government has recently announced that it will increase the number of authorised overtime hours and reduce the restriction on women’s night work.
Now, part of the solution undoubtedly lies in pressure on China to meet social and environmental standards, so that its competitive advantage is not based on the appalling exploitation of workers or the environment. But that alone is not enough. The challenge posed by China raises some fundamental questions about the logic and direction of free trade itself and it demonstrates the destruction that happens when a country has not just a comparative advantage but a more or less absolute advantage in so many areas. The old theories about free trade always being a win-win arrangement are shown to be fundamentally flawed and therefore the Commission urgently needs to undertake more research in order to understand these new trends better and formulate appropriate policy approaches.
Finally, I just want to say that I regret that two of the amendments submitted today link textiles and REACH. I think those amendments are very misleading and unhelpful and unfortunately, largely because of those amendments, my Group will abstain on the final vote on this report."@en1
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