SA is seeking to maximise its Agoa benefits at 20th annual forum

After considerable diplomatic drama and one postponement, the annual forum of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) will be held from 2 to 4 November in Johannesburg, when South Africa will seek to maximise its exploitation of the measure to gain greater access to the lucrative US market.

Pretoria’s tension with Washington over its perceived pro-Russian stance in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine caused the forum to be postponed from September and then almost cancelled. But energetic diplomacy by the government saved the day and it now offers an opportunity for South Africa to boost its exports to the US.

Scores of US, South African and other African political, business and civil society leaders, including trade unionists, will gather at Nasrec to make deals and consider how to make Agoa work better for the continent.

South Africa exported goods worth about R60-billion to the US under Agoa in 2022, according to US figures. About half of that was in vehicles – many of them high-end Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs – and about R8-billion was in agricultural products, much of it citrus and wine. Jewellery was another major export.

But Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Ebrahim Patel made it clear this week that he wanted to increase those export volumes considerably and that the forum would be a good opportunity to discuss this.

Patel told a media briefing on 26 October that most of the South African companies taking advantage of Agoa were large and he hoped to encourage small and medium-sized companies also to find ways of using it.

He suggested that this might need to be done through consortiums as the advantages of scale were important in a huge market like the US.

Patel said an area of potential expansion was for South Africa to make better use of regional value chains by getting more raw materials and components from elsewhere in Africa. This would allow the country to build products that could be exported to the US through Agoa.

He noted that the emerging African Continental Free Trade Area, which is intended to open up the whole continent to trade, would play an important role in forging these continent-wide value chains.

Another opportunity, Patel said, lay in Africa jointly developing expertise in improving sanitary and phytosanitary standards to enable more animal and plant food products to be exported from the continent to the US market.

Pharmaceutical opportunities