Are Bangladesh RMG stakeholders divided on the Indian yarn duty issue?

Cheap, quick and dependable, Indian yarn, many feel, contributed significantly in turning Bangladesh into a sourcing hub for the world’s biggest fashion brands. But what once looked like a win-win arrangement is now threatening to unravel and at the heart of the current storm is a proposal to slap a ** per cent safeguard duty on yarn imports from India, ostensibly to protect Bangladesh’s domestic spinning mills, which seem to has snowballed into a major bone of contention between the stakeholders, if recent media reports are to be believed, which claimed the garment manufacturers and the textile mill owners took a contrary position on the issue.

Spinning mill owners argue that they are being squeezed to the wall by Indian competitors who, they claim, enjoy generous government incentives at home and therefore export yarn into Bangladesh at prices local producers simply cannot match. The result, they say, is declining sales, mounting losses and, in some cases, shuttered mills. From their perspective, the safeguard duty is not protectionism but survival. Without some kind of barrier, they argue, Bangladesh risks hollowing out a key segment of its industrial base.