US textile and cotton groups are on the verge of formally asking the Commerce Department to pre-emptively restrict clothing imports from China next year, industry officials said on Thursday.
The groups hope to file the first of a still unspecified number of petitions as early as Friday, the officials said. The National Council of Textile Organisation, the National Cotton Council and other industry groups have scheduled a news conference on Tuesday - after the long US Columbus Day weekend - to talk in more detail about their requests.
"Our hope is that we'll have petitions filed on a number of (textile) categories by the end of week," Gaylon Booker, a trade consultant for the National Cotton Council said. The groups will probably file more petitions next week, he added.
The action could lead to a showdown between the United States and China at the World Trade Organisation.
US officials say that a special "safeguard" provision of Beijing's entry into the WTO in late 2001 allows the United States to restrict clothing and other textile imports from China in anticipation of a surge.
China argues trading partners must wait until there is significant increase in imports before they can impose safeguard curbs limiting import growth to no more than 7.5 percent above the previous year's level.
The issue is coming to a head now because an international quota system that has governed textile trade for almost five decades expires at the end of the year as the result of a 1994 world trade pact. Many analysts expect China and India to dominate world textile trade when those quotas end, sweeping aside many developing countries in the process.
US producers also fear increased Chinese competition after the quotas expire and want the Bush administration to act before potentially hundreds of thousands of workers in states such as North and South Carolina lose their jobs.
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