Lesotho's trade minister said on Wednesday (24 September) 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 4 April 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 15-19 September.
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.
"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.
AGOA expires on 30 September and companies that benefit from it have warned that any delay in renewing it risked significant job losses and factory closures.
A spokesman for Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee said, "The Trump administration hasn't informed Finance Committee Democrats [of] its position on renewing AGOA. Ranking Member Wyden continues to support renewing the program."
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