On May 18, 2017, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) formally notified Congress of the Trump Administration's intent to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As during the original NAFTA negotiations in the early 1990s among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, textile and apparel trade is once again likely to attract considerable congressional attention and debate. NAFTA, which took effect nearly a quarter-century ago, lowered or removed many barriers to goods trade within North America. Prior to NAFTA, 65% of U.S. apparel imports from Mexico entered duty-free, and the remaining 35% faced an average tariff rate of 17.9%. Mexico's average tariff on U.S. textile and apparel products was 16%, with duties as high as 20% on some products. Over the 10-year period after NAFTA entered into force, all tariffs on textile and apparel produced and traded within North America were fully eliminated, spurring more integrated textile and apparel production in the region. Many specific provisions affecting textile and apparel trade appear in NAFTA's Annex 300-B. The Trump Administration has stated that its objectives for renegotiation of NAFTA include maintaining duty-free access to the Mexican and Canadian markets for U.S. textile and apparel products and improving competitive opportunities for U.S. textiles and apparel, while taking into account U.S. import sensitivities. The Administration has also proposed changes in other areas of the agreement, such as customs enforcement and rules for determining a good's origin, which may be significant for the textile and apparel industries. U.S. textile producers and the domestic retail and apparel sectors have asked that the Trump Administration strive to "do no harm" in the renegotiation and avoid any disruption to trade and investment linkages encouraged by NAFTA. Formal talks with Canada and Mexico began in August 2017. If a new NAFTA deal is reached, it would be subject to ratification by the legislatures of all three countries. Another possibility is that President Trump may decide to withdraw from NAFTA, which the United States can do with six months' notice to the other parties. The textile industry is one of the oldest manufacturing industries in the United States. Since NAFTA took effect more than two decades ago, there have been substantial changes in the U.S. textile industry—perhaps most notably, it has become highly automated and capital-intensive. In addition, textile businesses have arranged their North American production around the agreement's terms. U.S. textile manufacturers, generating $18.3 billion in value added in 2016, make yarns and fabrics from raw materials such as cotton and various man-made fibers. The United States is a significant producer of cotton, the most common natural fiber. Consumption of cotton by U.S. textile mills peaked in 1997. Since then, U.S. mill use of cotton has dropped about 70% due to the decrease in domestic textile production caused by competition from imported textile and apparel products. In 2016, Mexico was the 5 th -largest U.S. export market for U.S. raw cotton, accounting for about 9% of total U.S. cotton exports, and Canada was 35 th . Neither Canada nor Mexico is a significant producer of other natural fibers, such as jute, flax, or sisal. The United States accounted for about 4% of global production of man-made fibers in 2016. Since 2000, most of the global growth in man-made textile manufacturing has taken place in China, which by 2016 accounted for two-thirds of total worldwide production, principally polyester, which is substitutable for cotton fiber. Other important producers of man-made fibers are India, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and Japan. The U.S. textile industry is a supplier industry to three main industrial end-use sectors: apparel, home textiles and floor coverings, and technical textiles consumed in manufactured industrial production. Each faces different market conditions. Prior to the implementation of NAFTA, the domestic apparel industry consumed about a quarter of U.S.-manufactured fibers. By 2015, roughly 9% of U.S. manufactured fibers went to domestic apparel use. The United States' share of global apparel exports has fallen to 1.3% in 2015 from 4.4% in 2000, according to the World Trade Organization (WTO). According to the American Apparel & Footwear Association, an industry group, 98% of all apparel purchased by U.S. consumers is produced outside the United States. Mexico, the leading source of U.S. apparel imports in the late 1990s and early 2000s, slid to sixth place in 2016, behind China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. Apparel imports from Canada comprised less than 1% of all U.S. apparel imports in 2016. Another way the apparel industry has changed since 1994 is that although many of the world's largest apparel retailing and marketing firms are headquartered in the United States, they now frequently manufacture through a combination of facilities they own and third-party arrangements in low-cost regions of the world. U.S.-headquartered apparel firms commonly contract directly with apparel sourcing companies, which in turn portion out the production work to independent manufacturers. NAFTA rules have encouraged the sourcing of apparel from Mexican plants that use U.S.-made yarn and fabric rather than from Asian plants that use little or no U.S. content. About 40% of domestic textile output went into home textiles, furnishings, and floor coverings (a category known as "made-up textiles") in 2015. U.S. manufacturers of these products have fared far better against import competition than apparel manufacturers. This is mainly because manufacturing of carpets, curtains, and tablecloths is highly automated and labor costs are relatively unimportant. For example, the development of larger, faster carpet-tufting machines contributed to a decline in employment at U.S. carpet and rug mills from 47,800 workers in 2006 to 31,600 in 2016. The health of the carpet and rug mill industry is tied in large part to conditions in domestic housing and commercial building construction, raw material prices, and competition from foreign producers. Canada and Mexico are the top two export markets for the United States' made-up textiles. Technical textiles, which are used across various industrial sectors from agriculture, construction, and medical use to transportation, accounted for about half of U.S. textile output in 2015. Technical textiles are reportedly the fastest-growing segment of the textile industry worldwide. IBISWorld, a market research firm, estimates the U.S. domestic market for industrial textiles at $22 billion in 2017. Industry observers say the United States is a leader in the production of technical textiles chiefly because these high value-added products require advanced manufacturing processes and significant research and development, limiting import competition from low-wage countries. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Mexico is the largest market for U.S. technical textiles, especially for use in Mexico's large automotive sector, followed by Canada. Canada also ranks as a top market for U.S.-made industrial protective apparel, with end-user industries such as oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, and mining. Canada and Mexico are the first- and second-largest markets, respectively, for U.S. exports of medical textiles. Because the automotive industry is a large user of technical textiles, domestic producers could be affected by proposed changes to NAFTA's domestic content requirements for motor vehicle products. According to one estimate, automotive manufacturers in the United States used about 330 million square yards of fabric in 2015 for headliners, fabric seats, airbags, seat belts, door panels, engine filters, and trunk liners. One change in NAFTA proposed by the United States would require motor vehicles to have 85% North American content and 50% U.S. content to qualify for tariff-free treatment. If auto manufacturers were to import more passenger cars from outside the NAFTA region and pay the 2.5% U.S. import duty rather than complying with stricter domestic content requirements, automotive demand for U.S.-made technical textiles could be adversely affected. NAFTA has been criticized for causing a loss of production and employment in U.S. manufacturing. The effects of NAFTA with respect to textiles and apparel, however, are not straightforward, and the drop in domestic textile and apparel production and jobs cannot be blamed solely on the agreement. Making it difficult to isolate the impact of NAFTA are the many other factors that have contributed to the shrinking size of the domestic textile and apparel sectors over the past quarter-century, among them automation, industry consolidation, currency fluctuations, and economic growth. The textile industry has been less prone to relocation to lower-wage countries than apparel manufacturing because yarn and fabric production is capital- and scale-intensive, demanding higher worker skills than apparel production; as discussed below, apparel production tends to be low-tech and labor-intensive. Nonetheless, since 1994, textile manufacturers have shed about 500,000 jobs, with direct employment dropping to around 230,000 in 2016 (as shown in Figure 2 ). The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the overall employee count in textile manufacturing will shrink to about 185,000 by 2026. Output by U.S. textile mills, which transform fibers such as cotton, wool, and polyesters into products such as yarn, fabric, and thread, reached an all-time peak in December 1997, nearly four years after NAFTA took effect. It began to trend down in 2000: by the end of 2007, production was 39% lower than at its peak a decade earlier.