• The president of Colombia Alvaro Uribe mentioned to the textile sectors that “trust” is the primary word to have in mind during the present world eventualities.
  
  
• As a support to the textile trade, the government defined the elimination of cotton and spandex  taxes.

The event, which had as assistants recognized members of the textile- fashion-confection trades, initiated with a speech given by Doctor Carlos Eduardo Botero, Executive Director from Inexmoda, who took his time to gratify the President for implementing harsh measurements in the fight against smuggling and disloyal commerce, and that have been really useful for all trades.     
 
Also, he emphasized that “the textile/confection and design/fashion trades have big challenges to overcome in 2009: according to exterior commerce, three’s a need to identify new market opportunities that allow diversification to other countries, take advantage of tax rates, free commerce trading treaties and present negotiation processes.

On the domestic field, he recommended to strengthen national brands, improving points of purchases and consolidate the relationships with clients”; he also aggregated that “with a renewed and increased team, Inexmoda will keep on working to generate solutions on innovation, investigation, commercialization, training, internationalization and competitiveness”.

On the other side, President Alvaro Uribe invited the assistants to confront the difficulties of the contemporary economic world issues by having “trust” as a permanent main idea, as the government does. He even gave some optimist historic statistics from between 2002 and 2008 according to commercial, investment and infrastructural fields. “It is not a road of roses, but we´ll make all efforts during a tough situation”.

Once he ended his speech, he initiated a conversation with the public in which he proposed the continuation of a series of strategic meetings with representatives from the textile- fashion – confection industries, that he had implemented during 2008, after Colombiamoda, that served as an open dialogue to solve problems such as fighting smuggling and sub invoicing.

As a representative of the trades, businessman Iván Amaya manifested the need to abolish taxes on raw material products such as cotton and spanflex in order to increase competitiveness, to that initiative the President compromised to overlook after a detailed analysis.

Finally, as a conclusion of the event, the President announced one more positive measurement for the trades and for economy in general: the strengthening of the commercial borders with Ecuador trough the entity Bancoldex.