The Central American Free Trade Agreement signed by President Bush buys the textile industry time to reinvent itself as part of a technological makeover of South Carolina's economy, 4th District U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis said Monday.

"It's clear that we've got to figure out a way to innovate, and take the textile industry first because it's maybe the hardest case," Inglis, R-Travelers Rest, said in a meeting with Greenville News editors and reporters.

CAFTA, which passed the House on a two-vote margin before the measure was sent to Bush, is a "relatively small agreement," Inglis said. But he supported it because it addresses important issues with China and is an important step in a changing global economy, Inglis said.

"These are little countries that will not overwhelm us with imports. They can't," he said. "They just don't have the productive capacity to do so. And they're not going to overwhelm us with orders, either."

Still, CAFTA "had some things to do with China that had to be fixed and we've gotten a start on fixing those," Inglis said.

The trade agreement eliminates nearly 80 percent of tariffs on U.S. imports to the Dominican Republic and the five Central American countries that comprise the treaty -- Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

The agreements include a provision against China's importing inexpensive textiles to the United States through those countries. Some U.S. textile companies opposed the trade bill because they fear increased competition and the loss of more jobs, claims that supporters disputed.

"We still contend CAFTA is an outsourcing agreement, and it's based on the flawed free-trade model of NAFTA," said Richard Dillard, a spokesman for Spartanburg-based textile giant Milliken & Co.

Inglis, who opposed the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, said he supported the Central American agreement because the Bush administration closed loopholes that would have allowed Chinese goods to enter the United States duty free, but mostly because, "I think the world has changed."

The Multi-Fiber Agreement, which regulated global textile trade for three decades, has expired, and another trade agreement, the Caribbean Basin Initiative, ends in 2008, Inglis said.

Yet, even with contractions within the textile industry, there is opportunity to succeed, he said.

"We have proficiencies here that we can see reborn into a new textile industry, and it'll be smaller in employment numbers, no doubt, but very valuable to the future of the country," he said.

Inglis said the textile industry's challenge is to develop "truly innovative fabrics," like materials that could conduct electricity that could be of interest to defense officials, Inglis said.

The Defense Department is interested in uniforms that could generate electricity from sunlight, eliminating the need for soldiers on the battlefield to carry 20 pounds of batteries, he said.

Also, there could be a need for draperies and carpets using new technology to generate electricity, Inglis said.

"That's the future, I believe, for the textile industry, and that's something we can do here," he said.

New textile technology, combined with South Carolina's efforts in hydrogen and fuel-cell research, can stimulate the state's struggling economy, Inglis said.

"We've got to figure out how to be very innovative," he said. "The thing that's sort of scary about that is you've got to run faster than everybody else in the world that way."

The government's role, Inglis said, is "to buy them a little bit of time, maybe buy some of that smart material" that the textile industry can develop.