Commerce Department Under Secretary for International Trade Francisco Sanchez last week said Commerce has not yet made a decision on whether to continue a Bush administration initiative to monitor Vietnam apparel imports to guard against unfair pricing.

“I’m looking at that and how we can best establish the overall goal of having a level playing field,” Sanchez said in an April 7 press conference. He was responding to a direct question on whether he would institute monitoring of Vietnam apparel.

Sanchez said he has discussed the matter with U.S. textile industry groups, but two industry sources said there have been no substantive discussions on their request to monitor imports from Vietnam and China for months with Commerce. They said there had been no clear indication that the issue is off the table, but that they did not see an imminent decision on their long-standing request.

One industry source also questioned whether the administration would launch a controversial monitoring program at a time when it is engaged in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations with Vietnam. Vietnam has to decide after the second negotiating round whether it will participate fully in the negotiations, according to a USTR official.

Textile industry representatives first raised the request of apparel monitoring for Vietnam and China to the administration when President Obama took office in 2009.

The Vietnam monitoring was launched in 2007 by the Bush administration, but ended when in December 2008 just before President Bush left office in January 2009.

Under the Vietnam monitoring program in 2007, the Bush administration pledged to review data on Vietnam apparel imports with the view of assessing whether initiation of an antidumping case is warranted. In the first two reviews, Import Administration has found no unfair pricing.

In an April 12 speech at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats said that Vietnam would be “one of the priority markets for promoting commercial ties,” under Obama’s National Export Initiative. However, Hormats identified human rights issues and a new price control regime under consideration in Vietnam as likely barriers in the market for both foreign and domestic investment.
04/2010