Association worried about garment smuggling
Antara, Indonesia
Jakarta (ANTARA News) – An association`s leader voiced concern here on Monday over the increasing smuggling of garments from several Asian countries into Indonesia.
The executive secretary of the Indonesian Textile Association (API), Ernovian G Ismy, said the smuggling of garmnets from ten Asian countries including China, Singapore, South Korea and India had increased in the past year as a result of lenient law enforcement.
“The trend has been on the rise for the past three years. In 2003 it reached 29 percent and in 2004 increased to 22 percent and reached 59 percent in 2005,” he said.
He said the figures were the outcome of a calculation of the difference between consumption, production and imports.
“Our garment production and imports are low, while consumption remains high. So how could the consumers cover the shortage. This means that the smuggling activities continued,” he said.
He said the government had been half-hearted and rather slow in dealing with smuggling in spite of the fact that the means for smuggling eradication were already available.
He said smuggling could be stopped among other things by checking imported garments through the “red tape” and by strictly enforcing port to port manifest regulations and imposing a harsher sentence on smugglers.
“So far smugglers have only received administrative sanctions and never been jailed, while their smuggled products remain in circulating in the market,” he said.
He said due to increasing smuggling activities, small-and medium-scale businesses in the country had suffered losses as their products are unable to compete with imported products.
According to API data, the number of small-and medium-scale textile and garment companies in the country reached 5,569 in 2004 mostly in Bandung, West Java. In 2005 the number dropped to 4,700 and their workers to 30,000 from 668,000.
“The loss suffered by the state and the public is big because the garment industry is labor-intensive,” he said.
He said the companies were domestic market oriented so that the impact of smuggling was significant to them.
He called on the government to help them by improving law enforcement and more consistent policies.
“I ask the director general of taxation to inspect import tax, value-added tax and income tax statements of retail businessmen, agents and producers,” he said.
Ernovian suspected that smugglers had used a new method in their operation namely by mixing other products with garment products in the same export container.(*)
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