For the first seven months of 2019, Vietnam’s cloth imports increased 4.5 per cent over the same period last year. Imports from China increased by 10 per cent, it is expected imports will continue to grow.

The textile industry is Vietnam's second largest export industry. The two digit growth has attracted a large number of investors, but its upstream industries such as weaving and dyeing and finishing don’t attract investment due to concerns about environmental pollution. This leads to the current imbalance in Vietnam's textile industry. Poor cloth distribution leads to the restricted development of the industry and low added value of production.

The EUFTA requires textile cloth should be produced locally. This may induce Vietnam's textile industry to invest in upstream industries. But pollution concerns come in the way. In the past few years, some projects devoted to the production of cloth materials have been turned down. For example, the TAL group of China put forward a dyeing cloth project, which was rejected. Dyeing cloth links do have the risk of polluting the environment, but if the project is put into the wastewater treatment process, the pollution can be minimised or even eliminated.