Africa-Press – South-Africa. A US House committee on Wednesday (10 December) approved a bill that would renew for another three years Washington’s preferential trade programme for Africa.
In a possible sign of reprieve for Africa’s most industrialised economy, there was no immediate mention of excluding South Africa as the US trade envoy had said was possible.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a law first enacted in 2000 to provide duty-free access to the US market for eligible Sub-Saharan countries and products, expired in September and hundreds of thousands of African jobs are estimated to depend on it.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Tuesday the Trump administration was open to a one-year extension but might exclude South Africa, which he described as a “unique problem”.
The US House Committee on Ways and Means approved the AGOA Extension Act by a vote of 37-3, a committee statement said, describing the trade initiative as “the cornerstone of economic relations between the US and Sub-Saharan African nations”.
“An extended lapse in AGOA would create a void that malign actors like China and Russia will seek to fill,” the statement added.
The bill will pass to the full House of Representatives, though it is not yet clear when it will take it up.
South Africa’s trade ministry says it is doing everything it can to ensure the country is included in any AGOA extension, even though relations with the US have soured badly during Trump’s second term in office.
Trump has railed against Africa’s biggest economy for its policies addressing racial inequality, and trade official Greer said it needs to lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers on US products for the US to reduce the 30% duties it imposed on South African goods in August.
South Africa says the Trump administration based its tariffs on an inaccurate view of the two countries’ trade.
A trade ministry spokesperson said South Africa was tracking the progress of the AGOA Extension Act closely.
Punishing South Africa
The progress in extending AGOA with no mention yet of excluding South Africa is a rare glimpse of hope in a process that has long being explicitly moving against the nation.
In November, it was revealed that US Senator John Kennedy introduced a new bill to extend AGOA for two years that would explicitly exclude South Africa.
According to Kennedy, the bill, called the AGOA Extension and Bilateral Engagement Act or “AGOA 2.0”, would extend the programme for two years, but only for countries that support US interests.
South Africa has repeatedly been singled out as working against US interests. This has largely to due with its close alignment with China, Russia and Iran, as well as leading the genocide case against US ally, Israel.
Specifically, Kennedy’s bill would pull in his earlier US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act to ensure that South Africa is not part of the new AGOA framework.
This specific bill from Kennedy was introduced to the Senate earlier in September, complementing a similar bill introduced into the House of Representatives in April.
The key difference between the House and Senate bills is that the latter explicitly calls for South Africa to be removed from AGOA.
If passed into law, the bill requires a comprehensive review of the bilateral US-South Africa relationship and a certification from US President Donald Trump on whether South Africa undermines US national security interests.
The bill also requires a classified list of South African government officials and members of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, eligible for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act.
Notably, the bill explicitly ends South Africa’s eligibility to benefit from AGOA.
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