Colombia says new shoe import controls appear to be working
11/01/2017
Colombia has been in dispute for more than a decade with its neighbour Panama, whose open-trade policies have allowed shoe manufacturers in China to take an easy and cheap route to the Colombian market through the process known as triangulation.
In 2015, the World Trade Organization sided with Panama in the dispute and said Colombia should apply a less punitive tariff regime than a seris of measures the government in Bogotá had threatened to impose.
Now, the Colombian authorities can apply tariffs of 35% on cheap shoes coming into the country from Panama but for there also to be a threshold of $6 per pair. According to footwear industry association Acicam, this move appears to be working.
The organisation said at the start of 2017 that, although the new measures only came into force in November, they have already applied to more than 350,000 pairs of shoes, some of which had a declared value of as little as $1 per pair.
Acicam president, Luis Gustavo Flórez, said in recent comments that in the first ten months of 2016 , 11.6 million pairs of shoes came into Colombia at a price of less than $1 per pair. He said this figure represented around half of all shoe imports into Colombia during that ten-month period and insisted that this demonstrates the extent of the problem facing domestic footwear manufacturers.
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