South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday that the country must prepare for possible exclusion from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the U.S. trade preferences program for eligible sub-Saharan nations, amid fraying relations between Pretoria and Washington.
“I need, as president, to prepare us if it ever happens,” he said at a press briefing. “So we should not go out and jump off tall buildings and think that this is the end of the world.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that white Afrikaners in South Africa are facing a “white genocide,” an allegation that has been widely debunked by independent fact-checkers, human rights experts and the South African government.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said during AGOA extension discussions last year that he was open to excluding South Africa from the trade initiative, calling it a “unique problem.” He also said South Africa needed to lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers on U.S. goods to secure a reduction in the 30 percent U.S. duties on South African goods.
The president reviews each country’s AGOA eligibility annually and determines its status for the following calendar year. The program, which was renewed in September with benefits backdated to Sept. 30, 2025, is currently extended through the end of 2028, though trade groups and governments have called for a longer term. The U.S. government typically announces any country-level changes or exclusions by late October or early November.
“Congress has decided that we should be kept in AGOA. What now remains is the executive,” Ramaphosa said, referring to Trump.
Ramaphosa said that losing AGOA would be “devastating” for South African jobs, which depend on the program’s duty-free access to the U.S. market for thousands of products, including automotive parts, agricultural goods, textiles and apparel. U.S. goods and services trade with South Africa totaled an estimated $28.8 billion in 2025, up 10.1 percent from 2024. South African trade union Solidarity estimates that some 500,000 jobs in the country rely on trade with the United States, including roughly 250,000 tied directly to AGOA preferences.
The uncertainty comes as parts of South Africa’s apparel sector face mounting operational and labor pressures. In Newcastle, a clothing manufacturing hub in KwaZulu-Natal, xenophobic protests have driven away an estimated 15 percent of the area’s 15,000 textile workers, according to the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union. Factory owners warned that staffing shortages and lost orders could lead to closures.
To minimize the impact of a potential exclusion, he and Deputy President Paul Mashatile have been traveling the world in search of alternative markets.
In February, Pretoria and Beijing signed the China-Africa Economic Partnership Agreement, under which China provides nonreciprocal, duty-free market access to qualifying South African exports across 100 percent of tariff lines. Set to run through April 30, 2028, it’s described as a “bridge” toward a permanent reciprocal arrangement.
Addressing the possibility of exclusion, Ramaphosa said, “We are not the first and only country to be taken out of AGOA. And I believe we will not be the last.”