US SANCTIONS
SIMON BARBER: Trump lets rag-trade bullies threaten African factory jobs
Rwanda, an African success story whose president, Paul Kagame, currently chairs the AU and just hosted the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area, faces US trade sanctions. The reason? Kigali has chosen not to import clothing woven and sewn in Asia, worn and tossed out in the US, then sorted and cleaned in India before finally being dumped into East Africa. Apparently the reluctance of Rwanda and its East African Community partners to welcome unlimited container loads of the rich and careless world’s detritus has been doing damage to the US. We are told it is threatening the livelihoods of some 200,000 Americans and costing the "industry" that would employ them $124m a year in lost sales. That, at any rate, is what the industry’s Washington swamp rat, the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, would have the office of the US trade representative believe, pulling the numbers from one of its anatomy’s darker places.The lobby presents no basis for its claim o...
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