Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-23-Speech-3-232"
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"en.20050223.17.3-232"2
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"Mr President, our textile and clothing industry is in bad shape. Since the end of the 1980s, French companies have been making workers redundant or closing down altogether, and more and more businesses are relocating to low-wage countries. Since the 1960s, the textile and clothing sector in France has lost two-thirds of its workforce, which is about 20 000 jobs per year, and today we are suffering 2 000 job losses a month. In my own region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, historically an important textile-producing area, towns such as Elesmes, Roubaix and Tourcoing have witnessed the closure of their businesses.
The social situation is already serious and yet it is going to get worse in future. Until now, quotas have made it possible to limit imports of textiles from third countries, but on 1 January 2005 the door was opened to imports on a massive scale from China.
France and Europe now need to define a strategy to defend their textile industry. We must as a matter of urgency request the WTO to provide safeguard clauses. Indeed, this option is available to Member States if a sudden increase in imports is observed, to the major detriment of a local industry, and this is indeed the case in France and Europe today. Since the quotas expired on 1 January, imports have soared, and the flood from China is destroying whole sections of what remains of our textile industry. Imports of trousers made in China between 1 January 2005 and 2 February 2005 increased by 792% compared to the same period in 2004. Imports of pullovers increased by 613%.
Before it is too late, and regardless of the opinion of Guillaume Sarkozy, President of the French textile industry union and a fierce advocate for the delocalisation of businesses, we must not wait to see our internal market flooded before we demand a return to customs barriers and safeguard clauses. The extremist advocates of liberalisation who drafted Article 314 of the Constitutional Treaty, announcing the opening of our borders to world trade and the lowering of customs barriers, are promising us major general industrial and social decline, of which the textiles issue is an unpleasant foretaste."@en1
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