HERE is the same PROBLEM ,its just in TEXTILES Exports to the U.S. heighten industry fears.YOU can PUT in the WORD (BEEF) for textile and (BRAZIL)for CHINA to make another story for the cattle industry without COOL.
WASHINGTON China has exceeded all predictions on textile exports to the United States since the lifting of global quotas in January, according to industry figures released Wednesday, confirming fears of American textile manufacturers.
In January, China shipped more apparel in certain categories, like cotton trousers, than it had in the previous year and a half, according to a U.S. textile makers group. But an importers' group suggested this ballooning might be partly a one-time phenomenon.
Predictions that China would flood the world market with cheap textiles had already inflamed trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, in part because of concern that the Chinese unfairly subsidize their industry and sell their goods at below-production costs, undermining U.S. producers.
In the first month of this year, 12,200 jobs were lost in the U.S. apparel and textile industries, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The countdown to the era of a quota-free market was looked on with fear by developing countries as well as the United States. Poorer countries in Asia with big textile operations, like Cambodia, are lobbying in the U.S. Congress to win special consideration and prevent China from dominating the world's textile trade.
But apparel and textiles are China's biggest export earner and China was prepared to take full advantage of the lifting of global quotas.
"This isn't like the Y2K crisis, where everyone was afraid of a computer meltdown that never happened," said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, a U.S. trade group that is pressing the Bush administration to impose immediate limits on Chinese imports. "This is happening, and the consequences are frightening."
Using figures from China's customs office, the textile group calculated that China is selling a cotton knit shirt at $1.71, down 45 percent from the $3.12 it sold for last year. Those low prices helped drive up imports of cotton knit shirts by 1,836 percent, it said.
The National Retail Federation had predicted the opposite. In documents submitted to court to block the administration from imposing limits on Chinese imports, the U.S. retailer's trade association said it did not anticipate major changes in sourcing from any direction in 2005 for the shirts and nearly every other product that had been limited by quotas.
Those statements were used to persuade the U.S. Court of International Trade to prevent the administration from imposing safeguards to prevent a surge in Chinese exports.
Don Brasher, president of Global Trade Information Services in Columbia, South Carolina, which tracks and releases trade figures from around the world and was the first to publish China's trade statistics, said this upsurge should come as no surprise.
"Were going from a quota regime to a quota-free regime, and China's one of the most competitive producers," Brasher said. "What do you expect?"
Brenda Jacobs, the Washington trade counsel to the U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, said she was wary of the Chinese figures and would wait to see the U.S. trade figures, scheduled to be released Friday.
"I just don't know what to expect. There will be shifting of production," said Jacobs, whose group supported the lifting of quotas. "But put this in context - there were a lot of companies that held off shipping goods in December in order to be sure they would not be caught in the quota system."