TEXTILES.ORG
President Donald Trump is in Asia this November to visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) is praising the administration’s recent determination reaffirming China’s non-market economy status for antidumping purposes and calling for even more aggressive U.S. enforcement to crack down on unfair trade practices.
“The evidence could support no other decision,” said NCTO President & CEO Auggie Tantillo as NCTO concurred with the U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s exhaustively researched determination that China is still a non-market economy. Tantillo adds, “Properly defining China as a non-market economy simply confirms what every U.S. manufacturer already understands – China has a set of unfair and extraordinary advantages that allow them to displace investment, production and employment in our market.”
The NCTO has encouraged President Trump to use his trip to Asia to reaffirm his commitment to enforcing America’s trade laws fairly, but resolutely. Tantillo pointed to public comments filed by NCTO suggesting additional reasonable activities the U.S. government could undertake to improve trade enforcement.
NCTO is a Washington, D.C.-based trade association that represents domestic textile manufacturers. It says that U.S. employment in the textile supply chain was 565,000 in 2016, and the value of shipments for U.S. textiles and apparel was $74.4 billion last year, a nearly 11 percent increase since 2009. Capital expenditures for textile and apparel production totaled $2 billion in 2015, the last year for which data is available.