United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Tuesday said he is open to treating South Africa differently from other African countries if Washington extends a trade initiative with sub-Saharan Africa that expired in September.
Greer told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing that the Trump administration was open to a one-year extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), but viewed South Africa as a unique case and could consider excluding it from the trade initiative if Congress pushed for that outcome.
“If you think that we should give South Africa different treatment, I’m open to that because I think they are a unique problem,” Greer told the hearing when asked if South Africa should be separated from any extension of AGOA.
He added that South Africa needed to lower tariffs on US products and non-tariff barriers on American goods if it wanted the US to reduce its 30% duties on South African goods.
A spokesperson for South Africa’s trade ministry told Reuters on Wednesday that the country is committed to ensuring it is included in any AGOA extension and will continue to lobby for the initiative to be renewed in its current form.
Tensions have been running high between the US and South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, after Washington boycotted a summit of leaders from the Group of 20 major economies hosted by Pretoria last month.
In addition, the US said it would exclude South Africa from the G20 summit in Miami next year.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week accused South Africa’s government of racism against its white citizens, an allegation that President Donald Trump has also made.
Greer told the hearing that South Africa had instituted many barriers to trade with the US.
“They’re a big economy, right? They have an industrial base. They have an agricultural base; they should be buying things from the United States,” he said.
In August, Trump imposed a 30% tariff on imports from South Africa after US officials failed to respond to several trade proposals submitted by Pretoria.
Greer repeated that the Trump administration supported a one-year extension of AGOA, a law first passed in 2000 to provide duty-free access to the US market for thousands of products, but would use that time to work with Congress to improve the initiative.
US wants to punish South Africa
The latest comments from the US trade rep underline efforts from Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate to punish South Africa for its geopolitical alignments.
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.
The senator said that the programme is necessary to “counter China’s growing influence in Africa”, but said that South Africa’s participation in the Act would be under review.
Specifically, the bill would pull in Kennedy’s 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.
With Reuters
