FOOTWEAR ON ALERT. Latin America fears imports overflow from Asia
Representatives of the footwear industry from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, in a joint statement, expressed their commitment to health care in the face of the impact of COVID-19.
They also conveyed to their respective governments the great concern in the sector about consequences of health crisis, the sustainability of companies, jobs and the value chain. In this sense, they were made available to the authorities, to generate reintegration strategies to normality and design commercial defense measures to contain the entry of footwear from Asia.
In one of its paragraphs it points out that "the Latin American footwear industry is strictly complying with the preventive isolation established by the authorities of each of the countries" and "in this way, the manufacture, distribution and commercialization of footwear today are completely paralyzed ”.
"The support that each State assigns to preserve the investments, the productive capacity and the jobs of the sector in these times when only expenses will be counted is central in all our countries. In the meantime, these internal policies compensate the lack of income for manufacturers, we would like to express our concern regarding the damage capacity that the production of footwear in the East will generate to our battered productive fabric. ”
This last consideration is based on the recent World Economic Outlook Report -WEO- of the International Monetary Fund on the consequences of COVID-19 in the global economy, where projected data on its evolution and the different performances by countries and regions are published. In this sense, figures for Emerging Asia are much more positive than for Latin America.
For this reason, the declaration of the Footwear Chambers of the region indicates that "it is essential to move forward with the development of transitional measures coordinated at the regional level, such as the application of safeguards, dumping and/or all those necessary to mitigate the difficult moment that we will go through”.
At the end of the document, there is a list of representatives of the acceding countries and their entities.
