European retailers hit back on Thursday at textile manufacturers and some EU governments who are pressing Brussels to extend import quotas on clothing and textiles from China. European trade chief Peter Mandelson negotiated the quotas with China in 2005 in what was dubbed "Bra Wars," but they are due to expire on December 31.
"I would hope, for the sake of EU retailers and importers, that Mr Mandelson sticks to his guns and is not influenced by the protectionist quarter," said Jan Eggert, head of the Foreign Trade Association representing EU retailers and importers.
The European Commission should not negotiate an extension of the quotas nor introduce emergency safeguards, and it has recently given signals it would not bow to strong pressure to do so, Eggert said in a statement.
Textile producers in Italy and other European countries, and their respective governments, are worried that the EU will face a surge of imports from China from January 1 because quotas in the United States and other countries run until the end of 2008.
Mandelson has said he will monitor imports but any move to extend them would require the agreement of China. Eggert said Chinese imports into the EU will increase after the quotas expire but that would probably be at the expense of other countries and would not cause an overall import surge.
Retailers faced chaos two years ago when the EU negotiated caps with China to slow an import surge after a previous, global quota system expired at the end of 2004. The new caps were hit quickly as retailers rushed orders and they had to be renegotiated quickly when goods piled up in ports.
The "Bra Wars" also split EU governments, pitting countries with big textiles industries, among them Italy, France and Spain, which pushed for the quotas, against more free-trading countries such as Sweden which saw the limits as protectionism.
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