With regard to textiles, we have four points that we have continued to hammer away at for the last four years. Obviously, there's outward processing, which is critical to our survival, which allows us to have an expansion of our revenues. It provides more customers for us to sell to and would allow the apparel industry to grow in Canada by being able to outsource what is the most difficult part of the total package, which is the cut and sew, which requires a labour differentiation that's too dramatic to be able to sell to the main market in Canada in the long term. We have seen this because there have been many firms in the apparel business that no longer manufacture anything here, and we can list the names. Probably of the 600 companies, half of them are importing probably 100% or at least 75% of their business, so outward processing is the issue.
On market access, we explained again that under NAFTA, when we had the U.S. as our market, we grew by 300%. Because the Americans, in their judgment, look for low-cost countries to produce, what they did in essence were the Caribbean and African trade laws, which eliminated Mexico and Canada from shipping in textile, yarns, or fabric to be able to manufacture in these countries. So they eliminated us from that market and we're excluded. It's only American inputs that can go into these Caribbean countries to come back duty-free.
The other issue, of course, tied to that was the idea of the free trade of the Americas, which had seamless goods moving within all the countries that represented that. I think there are 34 countries.
The last issue is the LDC, which I have hammered particularly. The LDC rules of origin absolutely need to be addressed, because you not only have these countries like China, Korea, etc., taking advantage of it and pushing to the lowest country for labour, and then they ship here and don't have to pay any duties, but you have the exploitation of the worker, instead of helping the worker in the countries we've signed the agreement with. They push them to the lowest labour cost or they won't give them the work. So if you can change the rules of origin so that they are more in line with what the Americans and the Europeans have done, you will then help to build those countries in Africa and Bangladesh by making them adjust and set up an infrastructure, rather than just using the labour to cut and sew. They'll have to put dye and they'll have to put knitting in order to take advantage of that duty-free entry.
This is what we need. Those are the four points. It's market access. It's customers. It's revenue. Some 90% of my apparel business goes into the United States. I have a strategic plan that works. We've grown our sales, but in the textile industry the same thing is required to have some of these four points put into work.
We've hammered it enough.