October 09 20
Industry

T

TEXTILE INDUSTRY WANTS POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION FOR EUROPEAN PRODUCTION

The textile sector wants the Portuguese government to support – near the European Union – the obligation of the 27 to buy, in terms of public purchases, individual protection equipment that incorporates a minimum of 50% of material from the European space. A decision to that effect could open the door for the European industry to reindustrialize itself.

Mário Jorge Machado, ATP’s president, told T Jornal that the meeting between the entire Portuguese textile sector and the Prime Minister António Costa was “a way of alerting the political power” to this specific need, instead of “returning to price priority” – or, to put it in other words, to shopping in Southeast Asia.

Mário Jorge Machado provided an insight into the challenges and opportunities that the industry had to face in the beginning of the pandemic, and that the cluster logic was the key to the immediate response that the Portuguese textile industry provided in record time.

It became evident that this model could be one of the ways for European industry to grow, at a time when economists say that the high amounts made available by the European Commission to help with the recovery of the post-Covid economy must be applied very substantially into reindustrialization.

Mário Jorge Machado supports this ‘reconstructive’ vision of the European Union, in a logic, he said, “of saving resources and keeping the Union self-sufficient” in several areas, such as health: as it was possible to notice, Europe was not it was prepared to face a pandemic phenomenon like the one that emerged last March.

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