America’s top business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Congress, along with the Pakistani government, is urging U.S. lawmakers to provide the flood ravaged nation with trade relief instead of humanitarian aid.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is asking Congress to pass The Reconstruction Opportunity Zones, which would provide Pakistani textile imports with near-duty free access to the U.S. market. Currently stalled in the Senate, the bill has already been passed in the house.

“In light of the devastating floods that recently struck Pakistan, we need to work together to secure congressional approval of this legislation on an urgent basis,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Members of the Pakistani government are also arguing that trade relief is much-needed in Pakistan, claiming that it would be an effective tool to fight Islamic extremism. With so many of the nation’s factories shut due to the flooding, some fear that terrorist recruiters could have success in reaching out to the nation’s unemployed.

“It would help if they would lower the tariff,” a Pakistani textile factory owner told The Wall Street Journal. “Being an owner of a company, do I benefit from aid? No. I don’t know what the government is doing with the money. They are not spending it on us.”

The flooding has destroyed 15 percent of this year’s projected cotton harvest, which could cause serious problems in Pakistan’s cities, where 40 percent of the factory jobs are in the textile industry.

American textile makers, however, are claiming just the opposite. They say that America should provide humanitarian aid, not American manufacturing jobs. Lower tariffs with Pakistan on textile exports would simply cause jobs loss in the U.S., they say. America already gets 17 percent of its cotton pants and shirts from the nation on the lower Asian Subcontinent.

“These bills provide Pakistan with special tariff preferences for products constituting 74 percent of the volume they ship to the U.S. market, while preserving normal duty treatment on the categories critical to workers and producers throughout our hemisphere,” the groups said.

The textile industry has been a historically vital part of the nation’s economy. Employing over 600,000, in 2005 alone, the industry contributed $23 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product. Competition from low-wage nations, such as India, Pakistan, China and Vietnam, however, have taken its toll on the industry.

From 1997 to the present, 1,298 textile mills have closed, according to the National Council of Textile Organizations. Most of those closings were in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, but factories across the country have closed. And in the five year period between 2004 and 2009, a seasonally adjusted 39.4 percent of the industry’s jobs were lost.

“If this proposal were to be accepted, it would cause irreparable damage to the U.S. textile industry resulting in significant job losses,” the National Association of Textile Organizations, the National Cotton Council and three other industry groups said in the letter.

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