Cited: ApparelNews.net

Businesses being complicated by the dwindling world of US yarn mills for US and Central American knitters that try to comply with the complicated regulations of the DR-CAFTA. According to Keith Dartley, president of Swisstex Direct in Los Angeles, the marketing and sales arm for Swisstex California and Swisstex El Salvador, it is getting harder to find a steady supply of U.S. yarns that can be delivered to his company’s knitting operations in El Salvador in a timely manner.

Stowe used to supply about 30 percent of Swisstex’s yarn in El Salvador, and Ramtex provided another 10 percent. Now Swisstex El Salvador is using ring-spun yarn from primarily Parkdale Mills and Wellstone Mills. However, Swisstex is finding that with fewer U.S. yarn suppliers, delivery times are getting longer. For high-quality, ring-spun yarn, shipments take about one month to arrive.

“There are retailers who are expecting faster delivery than ever right now. You don’t know what is coming [in terms of orders] until it shows up, and then you are scrambling,” Dartley said. “I’m concerned that when business gets stronger again, the delivery times will go up further, and at some point, there may not be enough yarn for delivery.”

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Under DR-CAFTA, U.S. manufacturers have an option to buy Central American yarn if U.S. yarn is unavailable. But that option is tricky because much of the local yarn is already committed to local knitters and garment makers. “They will only sell you yarn if they have excess capacity, which is hard to plan for purchasing,” Dartley explained.

Once the yarn prices began dropping, and textile executives began looking carefully at the supply chain, the true story of the cheap yarn began to unravel. NCTO’s Johnson said illegal yarn importers made mistakes along the way by filing false paperwork. Through shipping records, textile experts unearthed that yarn was coming into Miami from Asia, being relabeled as U.S. yarn and then sent off to Central America.

Parkdale’s Nation said one of the main culprits is a shell company called Yarns America, whose Web site says it is based in Lawrence, N.Y., and has plants in North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. Its total capacity is listed as 526,400 spindles, which seems amazing when compared with Parkdale’s capacity of about 250,000 spindles,

“Yarns America doesn’t exist,” Nation said. “The amount of yarn they produce is supposedly more than us, but we had never heard of them. We would know them if they existed.”

Several calls to Yarns America resulted in the same phone message saying that “all lines were presently busy,” even when the calls were made at 8 p.m. (New York time). Textile executives told the House panel that it was frustrated with U.S. Customs and Border Protection doing very little to resolve this problem.

NCTO’s Johnson said his group has met regularly with customs officials, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office and the U.S. Department of Commerce but has become aware that the government lacks the resources and personnel to battle the complicated issue of transshipments. The number of trade-preference claims reviewed last year, Johnson said, was only 1,500 of approximately 1.5 million claims made under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Andean Trade Preference Act and CAFTA.

However, Janet Labuda, U.S. Customs’ director of textile and apparel policy and programs in Washington, D.C., said her office has made trade-preference claims an enforcement priority. Last year, she said, customs collected $5.5 million in fines for denied trade-preference claims.

“We are certainly trying to work with domestic industry to address their concerns and allegations,” Labuda said. She added that by the end of this fiscal year, Sept. 30, customs will have conducted factory inspections in every CAFTA country to ferret out transshipments and false claims. “We are doing our best to ensure appropriate enforcement of our textile laws,” she said.

But textile executives want to see more. They are hoping Congress passes a Textile Enforcement Bill to allocate new resources, money and tools to help customs deal with this issue.

NCTO would like to see more import specialists working at the nation’s principal ports, particularly in Miami; Los Angeles; and Long Beach, Calif. The textile industry believes there needs to be more trade verifications done by customs inspectors, more training for textile and apparel import specialists, and a rapid-response team of apparel and textile import specialists created at the ports to target fraud outbreaks.

“If we can catch a few of the bad guys, it most likely would make a big difference with the rest of them,” he said. “We are working hard to save American jobs and revenue for the government. I don’t know what is wrong with that.” Fraudulent goods should be seized instead of fining those that commit the crime according to Parkdale’s. Laws concerning import of apparel and textiles needs to be changed so that customs can help prevent future problems such as this.

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My Take: If these illegal yarn importers are making so many mistakes, then it should be easy to stop them. The quicker they stop them, the quicker it will help the economy. Too many people are out of work as it is, not to mention the price is going up.

The price of yarn may not be very important to many people, but to crafters is very important. Even to apparel manufacturers it is be important. Yarn is also used in mass production of various pieces of clothing like sweaters. Those manufacturers also employ hundreds of people who also purchased yarn and sweaters.

Yarn is also used to make wholesale headbands for infants and toddlers. The less yarn that is available for less handmade gifts you can buy for your little girl. That means that beautiful flower hat that she wants may not be available. However, you can still find vendors online where you can purchase a hair bow or baby headbands at your leisure.

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More T-shirts

You remember all those Greek shirts that you had in college. Do you realize that corporate America is now utilizing the same idea for their employees? You can now find executives wearing college t shirts that are Greek under their sports jacket to work. Some vendors will even allow you to turn in your own t shirts designs. Maybe they think that this allows you to make better cool t-shirts then they can.

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Did you know that you can get some of the finest Celtic jewelry online? Jewelry that is crafted in Dublin in a traditional manner is really available online. Not only that, you can get Irish jewelry and claddagh jewelry and it is all hand crafted specifically for you. The best kind of jewelry from Dublin is hallmarked, which is a way of identifying the goldsmiths or silversmiths that crafted a particular piece. This started way back in 1637 and is still used today.

Cited: AP Business

The United States and Europe have complained of unfair trade practices by China and now China is on the defensive by curbing its exports of industrial raw materials. To top it off, China has filed a challenge on the US banned of Chinese poultry. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has stated they are in compliance with Chinese trade commitments and that they are only meant to protect the environment.

The United States and European Union filed World Trade Organization complaints Tuesday accusing Beijing of unfairly favoring its domestic steel, chemicals and other industries by restricting foreign rivals’ access to key materials. China is a major supplier of several materials.

“The goal of the Chinese side’s policy on the relevant exports is to protect the environment and natural resources, and the Chinese side considers the relevant policy to be compliant with WTO regulations,” the ministry said in a written statement. It said Beijing hopes to resolve the dispute through dialogue in the Geneva-based WTO.

The complaints add to tensions over Beijing’s industrial policies that have been aggravated by the plunge in world trade. China has raised taxes on exports of coke, steel, fertilizers and other goods to curb the growth of industries deemed too dirty or energy-intensive and to ensure supplies at reasonable prices for domestic buyers.

The materials cited in the U.S. and European complaints include coke, bauxite, magnesium and silicon metal. China is the biggest exporter of coke, a fuel made from coal and used in steelmaking and other industries.

The communist government also has rankled some of its trading partners by trying to boost exports through tax breaks and other aid to Chinese producers, which threatens to pump more goods into already glutted global markets.

Analysts expect U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration to file more trade cases against China following his campaign promises to take a tougher approach with U.S. trading partners. Pressure to protect American jobs has mounted as the country struggles with its longest recession since World War II.

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Both Beijing and Washington have imposed measures favoring domestic industries in their economic stimulus packages enacted in response to the global slowdown. China criticized Washington’s “Buy American” measure favoring U.S.-made iron, steel and manufactured goods in stimulus projects. Beijing announced its own “Buy China” requirement this month for projects to use domestically made goods wherever possible.

Beijing announced this week it will cut some export taxes July 1 but the goods affected did not include materials cited by the United States and Europe and it was unclear whether the step would mollify them. Taxes on fertilizers will fall from as high as 110 percent to 10 percent, on ammonia from 50 percent to 10 percent and on some types of steel girders from 10 percent to 5 percent. The announcement did not mention coke, bauxite or magnesium.

The WTO hearing process can take up to a year. If the U.S. and EU prevail and China refuses to lift its restrictions, the two would receive approval to impose sanctions equal to the harm suffered by their companies. Separately, the Ministry of Commerce said that Beijing has asked the WTO to investigate a U.S. ban on imports of Chinese poultry.

The two countries banned imports of each others’ poultry in 2004 following an outbreak of bird flu. Beijing lifted its ban after a few months and complains Washington has failed to follow through on a pledge to open its market to Chinese poultry exports.

“China’s poultry products cannot be properly exported to the United States, and this has hurt the legitimate rights of the Chinese poultry industry,” ministry spokesman Yao Jian said in the statement.

It said Beijing has asked the WTO dispute resolution mechanism to create a group to investigate the U.S. ban.

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My Take: Everything that I have read so far about China’s complaint: and of Chinese poultry doesn’t say anything about why. I wonder why? The US has stringent rules of inspection for any food product that is regulated by the FDA. Apparently, China’s equivalent of the FDA is not so, how should I put it, attentive in its work.

As I understand it, the ban on Chinese poultry was because the FDA did not want diseased or infected poultry products entering the US that could potentially cause people to get sick. That is the job of the FDA! They made sure that meat and poultry products on the market are safe for consumption. The source I read on the Internet stated that the areas that the poultry was prepared were not clean and that meant that disease could easily infect meats.

Another reason for the ban was that the bird-flu turned up in Hong Kong poultry and they were selling it to the public. In December 2008, CBS reported about three dead birds that were found to have bird flu. Supposedly, about 80,000 birds were killed and destroyed because of this. According to this article, it seems that there have been outbreaks in 1997, 2001 and 2008. In an 11-year period, they have killed almost 2.5 million birds. No wonder the US put a ban on Chinese folk.

Even if they were giving away custom shopping bags with their poultry, I would not buy Chinese poultry. Not even fancy personalized packaging could make me pay for infected meats. I will stand on the side of the US and FDA as long as China has infected poultry.

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Remember when you were a kid and you and your friends sat around trading sports cards? Well, there is one Internet vendor that is about nostalgia, but more than that it is about growing up in an age of innocence. Watching an otherwise somber businessman smile as he plays with a replica tin Roy Roger toy or listens to Glenn Miller on a replica turntable is a reward each and every day in their store front. In their store brand and on the Internet they have the art of Bob Byerley, featuring nostalgic paintings of children building tree forts or soap box cars, to funny alcohol signs and wooden airplane propellers. Their goal is to bring that same smile to every customer who remembered something from their childhood.

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