Tai Meets with NCTO Leaders
The domestic textile industry, which employs about a half million people and a million less than 25 years ago, was the focus of U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai's trip this week to factories in the Carolinas. Tai met with textile executives and leaders in the National Council of Textile Organizations trade group, and, according to a summary of the Sept. 23 meeting, she said the administration wants to increase trade between the U.S. and El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. One of the factories was a thread factory -- in the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, unlike in NAFTA, thread must be from either the U.S. or one of the CAFTA-DR countries.
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According to the International Trade Commission, Honduras was the third-largest export market for U.S. textiles, at $1.5 billion, in 2018.
"Tai thanked the roundtable participants for their remarkable effort to reconfigure their production lines to make personal protective equipment at the height of the pandemic," the summary said, and said that the administration intends to develop a long-term strategy to sustain domestic capability to manufacture supplies for future pandemics.
The NCTO also issued a press release after the visit, calling it "an unprecedented visit to the heart of the U.S. textile industry in the Carolinas by the nation’s top trade chief." The NCTO said executives from fiber, yarn, fabric and finished product segments of the industry told Tai their priorities, "such as the importance of the Western Hemisphere co-production chain and ways to jointly support domestic supply chains through Buy American and Berry Amendment policies that help onshore production, spur investment, maintain the safety and security of our armed forces and generate new jobs."