Friday, 6 November 2026:- The South African Communist Party (SACP) condemns the decision by the US administration to exclude South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) from January 2027.

This decision had long been expected amidst the vile spewing of racist tropes endorsed and spread by the US president, Donald Trump, alleging a genocide against white farmers in South Africa. Both the decision and the racist fabrication used to support it, of a non-existent genocide in South Africa against white people, are clearly part of a reaction to South Africa’s correct and principled decision to refer the apartheid Israeli settler regime’s genocide against Palestinian people to the International Court of Justice. The timing of the announcement, on the eve of the US mid-term elections, appears to have been designed to facilitate ratification during the lame-duck session of its outgoing Congress before the incoming one takes office.

In sections of the capitalist commercial media, as well as among so-called Afri-MAGA circles, South Africa’s exclusion has been portrayed as a major disaster allegedly caused by our country’s refusal to accede to what are presented as reasonable demands from the US administration. This narrative deliberately obscures both the character of AGOA in practice and the extent to which its value had already been significantly undermined.

AGOA was established to serve as a non-reciprocal preferential trade arrangement intended to provide African countries with preferential access to the US market. However, South Africa’s experience demonstrates that continued access to AGOA has repeatedly been tied to demands for concessions that advance US capitalist commercial interests at the expense of South Africa’s industrial development, productive capacity and policy sovereignty.

The US, and more aggressively now under the second Trump administration, has been using AGOA as an imperial policy tool to usurp or undermine South Africa’s hard-won fundamental right to self-determination by dictating what South Africa can and cannot do and what domestic and international relations policies South Africa can and cannot adopt. This is to use AGOA to make the US government South Africa’s sovereign policymaking authority. The SACP strongly condemns the imperialist machinations in defence of our national independence.   

Instead of a truly non-reciprocal preferential trade arrangement, South Africa faced sustained pressure from the US over many years to make concessions affecting the development and growth of strategic sectors of the South African economy to retain AGOA access. These concessions included measures affecting poultry, pork, beef and sanitary and phytosanitary regulations. As part of negotiations linked to AGOA, South Africa agreed in 2015 to permit the annual importation of 65,000 tonnes of US poultry products, commonly referred to as chicken “spare parts”, under a special arrangement. The quota was subsequently expanded, and the last time it was expanded was early this year, to approximately 73,881 tonnes. Its expansion was accompanied by the removal of anti-dumping duties on categories of US poultry imports, which is unfair.

The pressure extended beyond tariffs and quotas. The US repeatedly challenged South Africa’s sanitary and phytosanitary measures, which include food-safety and animal-health protections affecting poultry and pork imports, characterising them as barriers to trade. These measures existed to protect human, animal and plant health and to safeguard domestic agricultural production, yet South Africa came under pressure to remove or water down a number of them in order to preserve AGOA access, which is also unfair.

AGOA is presented as a non-reciprocal developmental preference programme, yet South Africa was repeatedly required to make concessions benefiting US exporters in return for retaining access to it. This directly contradicts the developmental rationale upon which the programme was ostensibly founded.

Moreover, the practical value of AGOA had already been substantially eroded by successive trade measures imposed by the US. Since January 2025, the second Trump administration has introduced a range of tariffs on imports from countries across the world.

South Africa was subjected to particularly severe treatment, including a 30 per cent tariff under the so-called reciprocal tariff regime announced in April 2025. Although those measures were subsequently struck down on procedural grounds by the US Supreme Court, they were replaced by alternative measures that continued to discriminate against South African exports. Most South African value-added exports to the US currently face tariffs of approximately 12.5 per cent.

In the automotive industry, the US has imposed a 27.5 per cent tariff on South African products, which AGOA does nothing to offset except for a mere 2.5 per cent, bringing it to 25 per cent, while corresponding tariffs on UK products are 10 per cent and the European Union and Japan 15 per cent. This disadvantages South Africa, a developing country, while advantaging the developed UK, European Union and Japan without a programme such as AGOA.  The automotive tariffs effectively brought down or ended the last significant automotive exports from South Africa to the US, including exports originating from the Mercedes-Benz plant in Buffalo City, badly affecting workers.

The SACP reiterates its solidarity with the affected workers, both at Mercedes-Benz and at its suppliers, and in other sectors of the economy that have been badly affected by the concessions made by the government to retain access to AGOA and the tariffs imposed by the US. The SACP remains ready to join action by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and other unions in the affected industries.

In addition, it is misleading to suggest that South Africa’s exclusion from AGOA represents a sudden collapse in market access. Market access to the US for South Africa had already been progressively eroded by tariff measures that undermined the very preferences it purported to provide under AGOA. As another example, the US imposed 50 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, affecting South Africa. AGOA does not remove or offset these additional tariffs.

Its preference only applies to the underlying most-favoured-nation tariff structure on top of which the new tariffs are imposed. It is estimated that the removal of market access under AGOA may add a further 3.4 per cent points to duties already faced by many South African exports. Historically, AGOA benefited exports such as automotive products, citrus, macadamia nuts, wine and certain processed agricultural products. Yet the value of those benefits has increasingly been eroded by successive US trade restrictions.

The exclusion of South Africa from AGOA must therefore be understood not as an isolated decision but as part of a broader pattern that has been going on, of additional economic pressure and the pursuit of trade relations that favour the export of raw materials for use as inputs in the production of finished goods while constraining industrial development in developing countries such as South Africa to produce high-value finished goods themselves. This is the development of new productive capacity as a re-industrialisation strategy in the US through systematic constraining, destined to cripple such existing capacity and its development in countries such as South Africa.  

While the SACP in principle supports efforts to pursue a diplomatic resolution, if the US proceeds with South Africa’s exclusion from AGOA, there can be no justification for maintaining concessions granted expressly to secure or preserve AGOA access.

The South African government should immediately undertake a comprehensive review of all AGOA-related concessions and arrangements granted to the US. This review should include the tariff-rate quota, associated preferences and food and plant health and safety compromises, including poultry, beef and pork. Any related trade, regulatory or market-access arrangements concluded to satisfy US demands in connection with AGOA eligibility must be reviewed.

The objective of such a review should not be retaliation but the restoration of a fair, balanced and development-orientated trade framework that supports domestic production, industrialisation, food security and decent work.

Beyond that, the exclusion of South Africa from AGOA underscores the risks of excessive dependence on a single export market and on preferential trade arrangements that can be withdrawn unilaterally. South Africa must deepen efforts to diversify its export markets, deepen regional economic integration and expand mutually beneficial trade with countries of the Global South.

More fundamentally, the changing global trade environment means that the traditional path of industrialisation through exporting value-added products to higher-income markets such as the US is becoming increasingly constrained. South Africa must therefore place greater emphasis on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), not simply as a market for exports but as a platform for building regional value chains, productive partnerships and industrial capacity across the continent. By leveraging the scale and potential of the African economy, deeper, more inclusive and more resilient industrialisation can be advanced on a basis that is less vulnerable to unilateral actions by powerful states.

The SACP will continue to oppose any attempt to use trade relations to usurp or undermine our hard-won fundamental right to self-determination and trade relations used as a means of extracting concessions that undermine South Africa’s developmental objectives, economic sovereignty and industrialisation agenda. We will continue to support a development path centred on industrialisation, beneficiation, the right of all to work and decent work, regional integration and the transformation and diversification of South Africa’s productive economy.