Put On More Tariff?

The U.S. textile industry last week laid before the Tariff Commission a country-by-country quota-protection program to offset the flood of foreign cotton imports. Bruised by competition from abroad, domestic cotton manufacturers recommended that each foreign country be limited to the volume of its 1955 cotton exports to the U.S. Otherwise, U.S. textile producers will be placed in the position where they will have to establish overseas plants to take advantage of less expensive foreign manufacturing facilities.

Millowners claim that such protection is necessary because they are unable to compete with cheap foreign labor, are also being undercut by the U.S. Government, which sells surplus raw cotton to foreign manufacturers at cut-rate prices in order to meet world prices. Domestic producers cannot buy this surplus on world cotton markets, are compelled by law to purchase artificially supported U.S.-grown cotton, which sells for 8-c- per pound more. This has helped foreign textile products to undersell domestic cloth goods, foreign textile manufacturers to increase textile exports to the U.S. by more than 550% since 1948.

The complaints of the textile industry threaten to split the Administration on the problem of the State Department's free trade stand v. the Agriculture Department's farm price supports, which encourage farmers to grow so much cotton that the huge surplus must be dumped on the world market. Last week the Department of Agriculture, which by law must make the U.S. cotton surplus available to world markets at competitive prices, asked the Tariff Commission for an 8-c- per lb. duty on cotton imports. Such a tariff would make up the gap between the low cost of raw cotton on the world market and the Government-supported prices that domestic mills must pay.

In addition, the tariff request is expected to run into a storm of opposition from the State Department. State Department officials have argued that protection would cripple the development of underdeveloped countries for whom textile goods are the staple export, said that the U.S. must support free trade to maintain better markets for her exports. Cracked an Agriculture Department official: "We're interested in the American people, and State's interested in foreigners. It's just as simple as that."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.