MASERU (Reuters) -Lesotho’s trade minister said on Wednesday that the U.S. plans to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives the continent preferential access to U.S. markets, by a year, after returning from a visit to Washington.
A slew of tariffs that U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on global trading partners on April 4 hit African countries hard. They were widely seen as the death knell for the quarter-century-old AGOA deal, putting millions of livelihoods at risk.
Lesotho initially got hit with the world’s highest tariff of 50% on Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” – ruinous for the tiny mountain kingdom’s export-led development model, which was almost entirely dependent on textile factories selling jeans and T-shirts to the U.S.
Trump reduced it to 15% in August. A Lesotho trade delegation visited the U.S. from September 15-19.
Minister of Trade, Industry and Business Development Mokhethi Shelile, who led the delegation, told a news conference late on Wednesday that they met U.S. officials responsible for AGOA on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
“They all agreed that AGOA has to be extended and they promised us that by November or December (at) the latest, it will be extended by a year,” Shelile said.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We will be … monitoring closely … that the extension comes into force as promised, because if it doesn’t, we are risking losing more jobs,” Shelile said.
A ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee told Reuters: “The Trump administration hasn’t informed Finance Committee Democrats its position on renewing AGOA. Ranking Member Wyden continues to support renewing the program.”
(Reporting by Marafaele Mohloboli; Additional reporting by Aaron Ross in Nairobi; Writing by Tim CocksEditing by Marguerita Choy)
