Think Tank Expert: AGOA Is on Its Deathbed
The head of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that Africans who are worried about the possible end of the African Growth and Opportunity Act should remember that it's not just their countries that are losing trade access.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Zainab Usman said, "The Trump administration is completely overhauling its relations with the entire world. Canada, Mexico, that had a rock-solid trade agreement with the U.S. -- that means nothing right now."
Usman and others were participating in the Africa Day program of the Atlantic Council on May 22.
Usman said 21 African countries have reciprocal tariff rates hanging over their heads, and they'll have to wait until July 8.
Similarly, Otaviano Canuto, a senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South and at the Brookings Institution, said, "Hopefully something is agreed bilaterally with South Africa. All the others will have to wait."
He said it's unknown whether AGOA countries could negotiate as a unit. "The critical minerals will be part of the basket of negotiation to be sure," he said.
Canuto said that, as a Brazilian, he's seen that a regional trade agreement -- Brazil is in Mercosur -- needs trade facilitation between countries. For the African Continental Free Trade Agreement to be successful, African countries need to have better physical integration, so goods can move between them easily.
Steve Peterson, former senior director Africa, National Endowment for Democracy, was pessimistic that AGOA would continue past September.
"AGOA, I’m afraid, is probably a lost cause," he said. But, he said, it's only helped countries export "a little bit of textiles," and has largely been a tariff break on oil exports.
"Africa’s going to look elsewhere at this stage," he said.
Usman disagreed. "There’s a lot of uncertainty around AGOA, but AGOA is still not dead yet. Maybe it’s on its deathbed, that I concede, but it’s not dead yet," she said. "There’s so much that can be negotiated," she said, either country by country, or a subregional group, or across the continent.