Tens Of Thousands Of People Will Lose Their Jobs If Kampuchea Loses The EBA Tax Concessions.

The Kampuchea textile and Garment Association once again warned that if Kampuchea lost its trade allowance for EBA free trade concessions, it estimated that at least 90 thousand people were unemployed, and the Cambodian garment industry created more than 700 thousand job opportunities for local people, mostly female employees.

According to Lu Qijian, Secretary General of the association, the total amount of textiles exported to the EU every year in Kampuchea is about 5 billion US dollars, and exports to Europe in the first half of 2019 have declined compared with the previous year. Qu said that the garment industry has seen the negative effects of the loss of EBA preferential trade treatment. If the EU decides to withdraw EBA from Kampuchea, Kampuchea people will face a lack of employment opportunities in 2020.

In addition, some investment companies, including H&M, have stated that if Kampuchea loses EBA, they will be ready to move to China or Indonesia. In this challenging era, even a company with good brands can hardly cope with the impact of the market, because the cost of tariffs is somewhere between 12~15%. In the first half of 2019, the overall export volume of the textile and garment industry grew, but the increase in imports of textile materials offset the profits made by the textile and garment industry.