Joint action buoys clothing and textile sector

As the Department of Trade and Industry last week trumpeted the success of its Clothing and Textiles Competitiveness Programme (CTCP) in helping to grow the sector, its interventions will continue to rely heavily on those of SA Revenue Service in stemming the flow of cheap Chinese imports. Director-general of the dti, Lionel October, said the CTCP programme had breathed new life into the sectors where new decent jobs were being created. He said other Sacu countries had embraced the concept and that Swaziland was in the process of implementing it. “What he says is close to reality,” Brian Brink of the SA Textile Federation told FTW. “But you can’t just throw incentives at the problem without halting the cancer of illegal imports from spreading – and that cancer is being slowly reversed,” he said. “The initiative on illegal imports is handled by Sars, and the industry sectors are reacting and interacting on this front.” According to Brink, the introduction of the reference pricing database, which acts as a trigger to help Customs when a product is cleared or declared below those reference prices, is making slow progress – based on year-on-year analysis. “There are guys who are still importing at ridiculously throwaway prices – but they will get nailed.”