Ha Noi (VNA) – The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has announced that it has not found any evidence of Viet Nam’s dumping of textile and apparel products in the US market after monitoring the area for six months.

This is the first conclusion since the US began to impose the import monitoring mechanism on textile and apparel products from Viet Nam in order to seek evidence for an anti-dumping lawsuit.

However, the DoC said it would continue with the import monitoring programme until the end of 2008. The second conclusion on the issue is expected to be announced in mid March 2008.

“The conclusion is inevitable and they can’t say otherwise,” said President of the Viet Nam Textile and Apparel Association (VITAS) Le Quoc An.

The VITAS continues to oppose the monitoring mechanism and ask the US to narrow the scale or eradicate this mechanism.

According to the anti-dumping investigation rule, investigation measures can only be applied providing that there are factors to define that the US industry is suffering losses caused by the imports of Vietnamese goods, explained the VITAS leader.

However, the US still applied the monitoring mechanism to Vietnamese textile products even when few US makers are making these products and several other countries are exporting a much larger number of similar goods to the US .

“This is very unfair,” An said.

Many Vietnamese businesses reported that the application of this mechanism has caused negative impacts on their production and export activities as US importers feel insecure when placing orders in Viet Nam .

According to director Hoang Minh Khang of the Garment 10 Joint Stock Company, his company and other garment companies have sufficient evidence to prove that they do not dump their products but importers still shift to other markets to reduce risk.

As a result, the number of orders from the US has remarkably reduced from the beginning of the year, Khang said. Other businesses which are facing the same difficulties include the Ha Noi Garment and Textile Company and the Chien Thang Garment Company.

According to VITAS, DoC’s conclusion will bring relief to both US importers and Vietnamese businesses.

However, the supervision mechanism on Viet Nam ’s garment and textile is still an obstacle for the country’s garment industry in the coming time.

Apart from seeking new markets, VITAS and the Ministry of Industry and Trade recommended the Vietnamese businesses to strictly follow the supervision mechanism’s requirements to avoid unfavourable conclusions from the US .

According to the General Statistics Office, the garment and textile industry fetched an export turnover of 6.4 billion USD in the first ten months of the year, registering the highest growth rate among the country’ s export staples with a 31 percent increase compared to the same period last year.-Enditem