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EU, China reach agreement on textile imports
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-09-05 16:54

Those quotas were quickly filled as buyers and sellers rushed to get in under the wire, leading to containerloads of goods worth hundreds of millions of euros being blocked across Europe.

Chinese vendors wait for customers at a clothing market in Hefei, east China's Anhui province September 1, 2005. [newsphoto]
Countries with strong retail sectors, such as the Nordic states and Germany, have demanded the swift release of the goods.

But EU member states with large textile industries of their own, such as France, Italy and Spain, have clamored for cuts in Beijing's import quotas for 2006 and 2007 in return for releasing the impounded goods. Beijing has resisted.

Compounding the mess is the fact that some of the textiles have landed in the EU without either a Chinese export licence or an EU import licence.

Details of the proposed solution were not available but the EU official said it was within the terms of the June agreement.

"The EU and China propose to share the burden equitably in accounting for the unlicensed textiles currently held in customs," the source, who declined to be named, said.

China, which enjoys immense economies of scale thanks to its modern factories and cheap labor, has seen a surge in exports not only to the EU but also to the United States following the abolition of global textile quotas on Jan. 1.

Washington has slapped emergency curbs on an array of Chinese garment and textile exports but has failed to negotiate a replacement pact along the lines of the EU's June deal.


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