State governor supports ongoing action against Chinese imports
20/01/2011
Addressing a meeting organised by the state’s footwear industry association (CICEG) on January 20, Mr Oliva said: “We don’t want the jobs that the footwear and leather industries create in Guanajuato to be taken away by China. We don’t want our people to end up unemployed.”
CICEG president, Armando Martín Dueñas, said the state and national governments had to act to defend Mexico’s footwear industry, which supports 571,000 jobs across the country. He said the Mexican industry was totally committed to competition as long as the competition was fair, but he said specifically that the competition his member companies currently face from rivals in China is unfair.
His organisation is preparing to ask the Mexican government to extend anti-dumping measures in place for shoe imports from China that are due to expire at the end of December.
Mr Oliva said he supported the idea and, in a hard-hitting attack on the Chinese footwear industry, gave several reasons why. He said it was unfair to compare China’s footwear output to Mexico’s as though they were on an equal footing: his country produces 240 million pairs of shoes a year, while he calculates the current level of production in China at 8.8 billion pairs a year. He also said exchange rate policies presented challenges. He went on to suggest that shoes from China often presented serious quality issues.
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