AQSIQ Inspections: Unnecessary and Harmful
March 27, 2009 The coming March / April issue of Cotton International magazine focuses primarily on leveling the playing field in the world cotton trade. Industry leaders from across the globe make valid arguments for trade standardization and market unity. Of course, the timing for such measures makes them as difficult as they are necessary.
At precisely the moment when government leaders around the world are warning of the dangers of protectionism, it appears as if China’s Administration of Quality Supervision Inspection and Quarantine has implemented a protectionist policy. AQSIQ’s March 15 implementation of the Registration & Inspection / Rating System ruffled some feathers across the globe. While economic hardships may make actions like this more attractive to China, these actions are not popular among the country’s peers.
Brazil, Australia and the U.S. have been the most vocal in their protest of the new inspection system, which the countries claim would complicate and disrupt the cotton exports that are crucial to each of their economies. Because China is the world’s largest market for cotton consumption, to fiddle with protectionist policies is to fiddle with the livelihood for tens of thousands of cotton professionals across the globe.
“The U.S. suppliers and the entire world cotton community strongly oppose the proposed system given its arbitrary nature on an import process that has over-the-years incurred only minimal problems in shipments all satisfactorily resolved through cotton industry procedures,” said Joe Nicosia, President of the American Cotton Shippers Association, in a January letter written to AQSIQ Minister Wang Yong.
As of now, though, the Chinese government is moving forward and instituting a new inspection system. In an increasingly difficult market for cotton merchants, policies like these will do little to quell the current situation.
For more opinions, news and industry insight, please visit Cotton24/7, the new web home for Cotton International Magazine and the Cotton International Annual, as well as a sister publication, Cotton Grower Magazine. This week’s Cotton International Insight is the first to redirect you to the new site, and we hope you will stay and browse around while you are there. Visitors of www.cotton247.com will be able to research years worth of archived Cotton International content, all while keeping an eye on the day’s top headlines
GET THE NEWSLETTER TODAY!
