Unavailability of cotton yarn cripples downstream textile sector

Staff Report

Karachi: The value added textile exporters are finding it difficult to meet their commitments with their foreign buyers owing to non-availability of cotton yarn and feared there will be a spate of cancellation of valuable orders, losing of our foreign markets leading to large number of closures of the units resulting in mass unemployment, chaos and disaster.

It urged the government to wake up to the alarming fact and take immediate remedial actions to immediately amend Ministry of Commerce S.R.O. 26(I)/2010 dated 14th January, 2010 which is absolutely an eyewash with no benefit at all to the Value Added Textile Sector.

At a press conference on Wednesday Javed Bilwani, spokesman for the Value Added Textile Associations (VATA) and Chief Coordinator, Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers & Exporters Association said that sector is starving for cotton yarn because the major input of this sector is blatantly being exported.

He said it is unfortunate that Pakistan’s own raw material cotton yarn is not available to its own value added textile export sector and instead it is exported to our competing countries strengthening our competitors in the global market?

Despite several marathon meetings of stakeholders with the government and facts and figures produced by the Value Added Textile Sector from which it is evident that unbridled exports of yarn is greatly damaging the Value Added Textile Export Sector, he regretted that government does not seem to understand and grasp plain mathematics and instead manipulation is done in connivance with vested interests and an S.R.O. is issued which is not at all realistic but aims to increase export of Cotton Yarn much more than envisaged.

Bilwani noted that restrictions should have been made on all exports of cotton yarn and capping of exports should have been done on quantity of exports of previous year, which too is higher but unfortunately with the ceiling on exports as per the Ministry of Commerce S.R.O. 26(I)/2010 dated 14th January, 2010 the exports of Cotton Yarn would be 40% more than previous year, when actually as globally production of Cotton has decreased and accordingly we should have reduced our export of Cotton Yarn but this is not done?

He said that despite the much-hyped Textile Policy announced in 2009, objectives and goals of an export target $25 billions miserably could not be achieved.

Home | Business