The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is dead — at least for now, and some businesses in both the U.S. and Africa have started to look for opportunities beyond AGOA. Still others cling to a flicker of hope that there might be an extension or renewal as debate continues, and the Trump administration has indicated that it might favor a one-year extension of the arrangement, which has allowed eligible Sub-Saharan countries duty-free access to U.S. markets since its enactment in 2000. Recently, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) introduced the AGOA Extension and Bilateral Engagement Act, also known as AGOA 2.0, which would extend AGOA for two years, while adding conditions intended to ensure the program supports U.S. interests and counters China’s growing influence in Africa. That bill would also require a U.S. strategy to negotiate bilateral trade agreements with select AGOA countries and emphasize clear eligibility criteria for participating nations, including democratic governance, rule of law, human rights, combating corruption, and open markets.
Despite these and other last-ditch efforts by U.S. officials, Congress, and African governments like Kenya, Lesotho, and South Africa, AGOA lapsed on September 30, 2025 without Congressional renewal. This expiry means industries from South Africa to Madagascar and Kenya that developed around AGOA now face closure or significant decline, while African exports face significant tariffs to enter the U.S. market. The immediate concern for the 32 former beneficiary African governments (including 21 least-developed countries) is the potential loss of tens of thousands of jobs, investments, and preferential market access to the United States for over 1,800 products. In addition to these immediate impacts, the uncertainty due to changing U.S. trade policy presents further challenges to economic planning in Africa.
The fallout has already begun, with Africa’s apparel and textile manufacturers hit the hardest. In Kenya, for example, more than 66,000 people — many of them women — were employed in the textile and apparel sector exporting to the U.S. Job cuts have already begun with United Aryan announcing at the end of September 2025 that it would be cutting 1,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, amid trade uncertainty. UNCTAD predicts that food exports such as fish and dried fruits would also be hard hit. In the agriculture sector, major exports like coffee, cocoa, cashew nuts, flowers, tea, spices, horticulture rubber, and wood products that enjoyed preferential access and competitive advantage under AGOA face threats of tariffs up to 15% (Figure 1). For example, for South Africa (the biggest exporter under AGOA), two-thirds of its agricultural exports to the U.S. benefit from tariff-free treatment under AGOA — reaching a record $646 million in 2022. Loss of AGOA access will significantly affect South African provinces like the Western Cape where agricultural exports are a prominent source of income and employment.
Figure 1: AGOA expiration adds to recent tariff hikes
AGOA has not been without its challenges and criticism, and these issues must be addressed in re-shaping U.S.-Africa trade in the long-term. Trade and the impact of AGOA have declined over the years. In 2024, U.S. AGOA imports totaled just $8 billion, down 13% from $9.3 billion in 2023. After the historical dominance of oil and gas, AGOA imports remained concentrated in a few countries and industries (Figure 2). Crude oil imports of $2 billion accounted for 25% of AGOA imports in 2024, with Nigeria leading as the top AGOA supplier of crude oil to the U.S. at $1.6 billion. Non-energy imports in 2024 amounted to $6 billion, dominated by South Africa and led by passenger vehicles ($2.4 billion), apparel ($1.2 billion), agricultural and food products ($949 million), base metals ($711 million), and chemicals ($251 million). South Africa alone accounted for nearly half of AGOA exports and is the top supplier of AGOA non-energy imports. Passenger vehicles and components accounted for 64% of South Africa’s 2024 AGOA-eligible products.
The lapse of AGOA comes at a time when the Trump administration is significantly reshaping U.S. commercial diplomacy and trade relations. This has created a great deal of uncertainty for both domestic industry and foreign trade partners. In April 2025, President Trump announced a universal 10% tariff on all imported goods effective April 5, followed by further tariffs from 20% to 60% for African countries, with Lesotho, Mauritius, and Madagascar hit with punitive levels. The ensuing months have involved brinkmanship, threats, general uncertainty, and sudden reprieves to enable the administration to negotiate trade deals with 90 trading partners. However, the administration has made no moves to negotiate with most AGOA countries. The exceptions are trade talks with South Africa and Kenya that remain inconclusive. This is unsurprising given the small share of African trade to the U.S. market. U.S. imports from AGOA countries totaled just $9.7 billion in 2023, with 43% percent being crude oil, and representing less than 0.25% of U.S. total imports. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa’s total share of U.S. imports is just under 1%.
Notwithstanding this challenge, African countries should not accept just any deal. Africa and its rich mineral, forest, and agricultural resources present a critical geopolitical theater. It is one where the U.S. across different administrations has failed to sustain a substantial economic strategy, especially one that would benefit local development. Instead, many countries have deepened economic ties with other partners like China, which has doubled down on its investments across Africa. While the U.S. has imposed tariffs, China announced the extension of zero-tariff treatment to cover 100% of tariff lines for all 53 African countries that have diplomatic ties with China. Last year, China-Africa trade reached $295.6 billion, “setting a record high for the fourth consecutive year, and marking the sixteenth consecutive year China has remained Africa's largest trading partner.” Agriculture trade has also surged. Through March 2025, Chinese imports of African coffee grew by 70.4% while cocoa bean imports rose 56.8%. This diversification is welcome, provided that trade protects and does not undermine the rights of farmers in Africa to receive a fair price, and engage in conservation and sustainable practices.
Still, the China-Africa trade relationship is not without its challenges. Bloomberg forecasts that Chinese exports to Africa are on track to exceed $200 billion for the first time in 2025. Critics contend that China-Africa trade is lopsided, with the continent running a large trade deficit with China. In 2024, Africa imported $178.76 billion worth of Chinese products while exporting $116.79 billion worth of products, leaving a trade deficit of $61.93 billion. There is a great desire to reduce the trade deficit with import substitution and greater local production while simultaneously increasing intra-Africa trade. According to a blog from EHS Africa Logistics, “Africa’s exposure stems from two enduring vulnerabilities: a narrow and underdeveloped industrial base as well as weak coordination of trade, and industrial policies. Without decisive intervention, the continent could find itself locked into a neo-mercantilist structure, dependent on imported consumer goods, and stripped of productive capacity.” The same concerns apply to agriculture and food trade, where African exports are dominated by primary commodities with limited value addition.
End of AGOA and start of a new U.S.-Africa partnership?
Several African countries currently face significant challenges due to potential changes in U.S. trade policies. For example, Lesotho’s textile industry is under threat from a 50% tariff on denim exports, putting approximately 30,000 jobs at risk. In Madagascar, a 47% tariff on textile exports has jeopardized around 60,000 jobs, straining the national economy. Meanwhile, in Côte d'Ivoire, anticipated U.S. tariffs of up to 21% on cashew exports have triggered a sharp decline in demand from buyers, adversely affecting the livelihoods of local producers. These cases underscore the negative impacts of shifting trade dynamics and highlight the urgent need for African nations to build more resilient and diversified economies.
Against these developments, we draw three primary conclusions:
- The lapse of AGOA is a chance for the U.S. to revisit its economic relationship with Africa and make a new trade proposal, based on pragmatism and partnership. A first step would be AGOA renewal — which enjoys broad bipartisan support — to provide some level of baseline certainty to the U.S.-Africa trade relationship. Such renewal could be a transition towards a new and improved trade relationship that promotes shared public policy objectives, including higher labor standards and cleaner production systems, while regulating rather than privileging private foreign investors. The U.S. approach must also put promotion and strengthening of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a central objective. However, with the current political uncertainty in the United States, realistically, there may be little hope of AGOA renewal being on the U.S. government’s agenda in the short term.
- To mitigate against trade uncertainty, African countries should continue to diversify their trade partnerships building on the AfCFTA and with external trade with partners in Asia, Europe and the Gulf region. These trade relationships are already growing. Again, the terms of that trade matter. For us, they should reflect the stated priorities of small-scale farmers, workers and consumers across the region.
- Specific to agriculture, as current U.S. tariffs redraw agricultural alliances, Africa is seeking to improve its food security and address expensive food imports, which are forecast to rise from $43 billion in 2019 to $90 billion in 2030, by increasing local and regional production of food, agriculture value-addition and intra-Africa food trade. While IATP and our partners have been critical of many foreign aid programs, we wholeheartedly support new approaches to bolster local food production and make trade complementary to, not the center of, the food system. Such programs should form a critical component of future U.S.-Africa trade to promote investments in strengthening sustainability and resilience in African agriculture and the broad adoption of agroecology. Such investments should build on previous U.S. and African government initiatives — which have been disrupted by U.S. aid cuts — that served to enhance soil, crop, and animal health infrastructure (in partnership with the African Union); improve soil fertility; promote crop diversity; and boost climate adaptation and resilience for farmers. They should also prioritize effective programs to provide African countries with tools to improve prevention, detection, and management of plant pests and diseases.
It is fair to conclude that there is general pessimism that recent U.S. tariffs may have effectively signaled the end of AGOA. Adapting to a new era of global trade shaped by economic nationalism and geopolitical competition, African countries have quietly gone about strengthening economic ties with other trade partners over the last decade as reflected by shifting trade flows and declining trade with the United States. A future U.S.-Africa trade partnership must deal with this reality. It should offer a carefully thought-out vision for broad-based economic partnership and investments, which complements while also competing with what other trade partners are offering in Africa. It is an opportunity to put forward a compelling vision for future U.S.-Africa trade that offers equitable benefits to African nations, workers, and business, helping to foster transformative economic development on the continent.
