The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has called on Australia to extend the duty benefits for 12 years even as BGMEA President Faruque Hassan also highlighted the declining prices in the global apparel market, which has posed a major challenge for the industry, especially when it is trying hard to make a turnaround from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As per reports, delivering the keynote speech on ‘Apparel Industry – Competitiveness beyond Covid-19’ at an international conference titled ‘Bangladesh at 50: From the test case to a development role model’, held virtually recently, BGMEA President Faruque Hassan, reportedly, maintained, “…We request the development partners, including Australia to extend the LDC graduation transition time by 12 years,” in view of the fact that around 83 per cent of Bangladesh’s export earning depends on apparels alone even as the apparel industry employs 10 million people, including backward and forward linkage industries, and that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe financial distress to the industry, which the BGMEA chair said will take some time to recover.
Faruque Hassan, further, reportedly, called upon the global brands and retailers to be more empathetic and follow rational pricing so that a secured global market could be built where workplace and jobs would be safer and sustainable.
