California Apparel News

Call it the pants fiasco.

When the Bush administration in early November decided that ski pants from China would be free of import quotas and no longer embargoed, everything seemed to be in order.

Then, when the first two shipments passed through Los Angeles International Airport a few weeks ago, there was a snag. Customs officials said the boxes marked as ski pants turned out to be filled with denim pants. Now just about every single shipment of ski pants is being given extra special attention when passing through customs.

“We are trying to scrutinize everything,” said Janet Labuda, director of textile enforcement and operations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C. “We have to have eyes in the back of our heads.”

Also falling under intense inspection right now are ramie/cotton pants from China. When the quota on Chinese-made cotton pants was used up by July 8, importers decided to sidestep the embargo and bring in pants from China made with more than 50 percent ramie mixed with cotton. There are no quotas on ramie textiles. Ramie is a vegetable fiber similar to flax.

Again, customs officials found hundreds of pants listed as ramie/cotton that were mostly cotton. Customs is seizing $1 million a week in ramie/cotton pants, Labuda told a Nov. 15 gathering in New York at the annual Textiles and Apparel Trade and Transportation Conference.

The result? Practically all imports of ramie/cotton pants from China are being analyzed at U.S. Customs laboratories to verify the pants’ fabric content.

“Every single shipment is being looked at, which is creating a 30-day delay,” said Los Angeles customs attorney Richard Wortman. “People are going ballistic.”

Michael Weisberg, chief executive of Second Generation, a Los Angles juniorwear company whose labels include Be Bop, had 15,000 ramie/cotton pants pulled aside and tested by customs. The testing caused a 10-day delay in delivery. But Second Generation tries to have its goods shipped two weeks early in case there are problems along the way. Second Generation had a second shipment of 2,000 pieces detained on Nov. 22. “We are crossing our fingers that the shipment is released as soon as the last one,” Weisberg said.

Before apparel and textile quotas ostensibly disappeared on Jan. 1, apparel manufacturers trying to save money would import ramie/cotton pants to get around having to buy export quotas from China. “Ramie is virtually identical in feel as an all-cotton pant,” Wortman said. “In the past, we would advise our clients here, especially those on the lower end of the market who couldn’t buy quota, to use ramie/cotton as a practical matter.”

Duty on ramie/cotton pants is only 2.8 percent while it is 16.6 percent on cotton pants.

“It doesn’t make any difference who brings it in,” said John Salvo, president of Carmichael International Service, a Los Angeles customs broker and freight forwarder with numerous apparel clients. “They are pulling samples and giving it to the labs.”

Testing fabric can take anywhere from one to four weeks. One particular quality of ramie is that it is a staple fiber, which varies widely in length. That means that sometimes during a test, one part of the pant may show the fabric content is made up of 52 percent ramie, while another fabric section might show a 49 percent component. Also, various treatments can alter the fabric’s mix. “Even heat can give a light switch to the content,” said John Clark, vice president of import production administration at Paul Davril Inc., a decades-old Los Angeles apparel company that does branded and private-label goods made mostly overseas. He advises that all exported clothing be lab-tested after processing and before shipping to make sure the contents comply with the shipping label. The company currently is not importing ramie/cotton goods.

New quota numbers

All the brouhaha over ramie/cotton pants will be moot next year when the recently negotiated China Textile Agreement goes into effect. The agreement, signed on Nov. 8 and expiring at the end of 2008, establishes quotas on 34 categories of apparel and textiles made in China. That includes sweaters, cotton and man-made fiber knit shirts, men’s and boys’ woven shirts, cotton and man-made fiber pants, bras, underwear, swimwear, men’s and boys’ wool suits, socks, silk/vegetable fiber trousers, and knit fabric. Fine-gauge knit-to-shape sweaters will have their own category and not be subject to quota.

The agreement gives importers some kind of predictability in estimating when quotas will be filled. In 2006, textile imports from China can increase on average of 8 to 10 percent over 2005. “That means that China is good [for apparel production] during the first half of the year,” said John Pelligrini, a New York customs attorney. “Then people will be looking for other places to produce in the fall.”

The agreement also established that all goods, except socks, embargoed at U.S. ports this year would be allowed into the country and not be counted against quota. The Committee on the Implementation of Textile Agreements (CITA), the U.S. government agency in charge of safeguard petitions and overseeing the embargoed goods, said it would be releasing embargoed goods from bonded warehouses between Nov. 28 and Dec. 2.

Also, CITA said it would not consider any of the pending 24 safeguard petitions because the quota issue had been determined by the negotiated agreement.

Those safeguard petitions included women’s and girls’ cotton and man-made fiber non-knit shirts and blouses, cotton and man-made fiber skirts, cotton and man-made fiber nightwear and pajamas, cotton and man-made fiber swimwear, knit fabric, underwear, cotton trousers, and socks.

Projected Embargo Dates for Chinese-Made Apparel and Textiles

Man-made fiber knit shirts June 19, 2006Cotton knit shirts July 11, 2006Underwear July 17, 2006Cotton trousers July 28, 2006Man-made fiber trousers Aug. 11, 2006Men’s and boys’ woven shirts Aug. 25, 2006Socks Oct. 24, 2006Sweaters Dec. 1, 2006Knit fabric Dec. 6, 2006Source: American Apparel & Footwear Association