Italian anger at anti-dumping mood-swing
22/09/2008
Italy's National Association of Footwear Manufacturers (ANCI) has reacted with surprise and anger to suggestions from Brussels on September 17 that the European Union may end its policy of applying anti-dumping measures to imports of leather shoes from Vietnam and China. It renewed its calls on the European Commission, the executive arm of the trading bloc, to extend the measures after the initial two-year period expires on October 6.
At the Brussels meeting, representatives of the 27 EU member states voted by 15 to 12 in favour of relaxing the extra tariffs on Chinese and Vietnamese imports.
Speaking in Milan at the Micam exhibition, the association's outspoken president, Vito Artioli, said: "The opinion expressed by the anti-dumping committee is not only ill-founded, but also constitutes a legal and economic error."
He went on to say that dumping of shoes on the European market by the two Asian countries (which means using anti-competitive subsidies to make export prices cheaper than domestic ones) had not stopped and insisted that the industry's pan-European association, CEC, had made this clear in a recent submission to the Euroepan Commission.
He also said that a two-year exercise was never going to be enough to allow manufacturers in Europe to recover from the "grave harm" that dumping practices had caused them.
"We are genuinely surprised by the fact that the anti-dumping committee seems to have taken into consideration the private interests of only a few companies, who have been carrying out big lobbying campaigns, without paying any attention to the negative impact an unfavourable decision would have on the European footwear sector as a whole. There is absolutely no way to justify the fact that an entire industry sector is having its future ignored and denied."
Share this story:
