Amid rusting barbed-wire fences, workers last week loaded up trucks with machinery left behind after the Burlington Industries plant closed last year.The factory was the latest casualty from a flood of cheap Asian imports and a move to shift production to Mexico, where labour costs are lower.

``We were just lucky to have such low unemployment, and there were plenty of jobs for those people to go to,'' Mooresville city planner Erskine Smith said. ``If this had happened 30 years ago, this town would have dried up.''Like mill towns throughout the US southern cotton belt, Mooresville is undergoing a transformation as the global economics of free trade reshape the apparel and textile industries and shift thousands of jobs out of the United States.

Those trends are expected to continue and possibly accelerate as US trade officials negotiate the entry of China into the World Trade Organisation.``I see the number of plants continuing to shrink, and I see the job cuts continuing,'' said Bryan Hunt, who tracks the textile and apparel industries for First Union Securities in Richmond, Virginia.

Since 1973, when US apparel industry employment peaked at 1.3 million jobs, the workforce in domestic apparel plants has shrunk to 650,000, according to the Arlington, Virginia-based American Apparel Manufacturers' Association.Although the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, cost the US an estimated 300,000 apparel jobs to Mexico, the apparel makers said technology and efficiency gains have boosted shipments from US plants by 40 per cent since 1993.

``If we're talking about the demise of the apparel industry in the United States, then I would say it is greatly exaggerated,'' said spokesman for the apparel makers' trade group, Jack Murphy.

Similar productivity gains have been seen in the US textile industry, which in the past ten years has boosted output to 17 billion pounds (7.7 billion kg) a year from 13 billion pounds (5.9 billion kg) with 150,000 fewer workers, said dean of the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, Robert Barnhart.

Despite the threat of deeper job cuts at home, both textile and apparel makers groups support the inclusion of China in the World Trade Organisation, which meets late this month in Seattle.

In North Carolina, where life in hundreds of mill towns like Mooresville has been intertwined for years with goings-on at the factories, the spate of closings has been painful.

``It's had a major toll. We're taking three steps backward and one step forward,'' said economic development director Gregory Cummings of hard-hit Robeson County.

Nineteen textile and apparel plants in the county have closed in the past four years, cutting the apparel and textile workforce in half and pushing unemployment above 8 per cent -- nearly double the national average.

But in a state with an unemployment rate hovering around 3 per cent for the past two years, most people laid off in plant closings have quickly stitched up new jobs while employers struggle to fill plant shifts.

In High Point, a centre of textiles and furniture- making, consumer packaged goods company Sara Lee Corp was forced to close a sock plant because of a shortage of workers in an area where employment stands at under 3 per cent, and consolidate production at other plants.

``We just threw in the towel. We couldn't do it, because people didn't want those jobs,'' Sara Lee spokeswoman Peggy Carter said.

In Mooresville, in the rolling hills of central North Carolina, the laid-off Burlington workers were snatched up by other manufacturers, including a glass plant that announced plans to open here a week after the denim mill closed. As for the fate of the denim plant itself, a company spokesman said it has been quietly put up for sale.

Town officials are mulling plans to turn it into a retail complex and commuter depot for a rail line envisioned to carry commuters into downtown Charlotte, about 25 miles (40 km) to the South.

``This plant closing left a big hole in the community,'' Smith said.