Opinion
Guest Post: AGOA presents U.S. President Barack Obama an opportunity to define his legacy in Africa
Hard evidence, however, shows that while African countries have certainly gained, as intended, the most from AGOA, the benefits have not by any means been all one-way. In the first decade since it came into force, US exports to sub-Saharan Africa tripled to US$21 billion.
As the US commerce department estimates that 5,000 American jobs are created or sustained for every US$1 billion worth of exports, this trade is helping support over 100,000 jobs in the US. The US trade department has also insisted that proper safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of the rules. Such an outcome would lead to considerable trade losses for African economies. But that study found that if the US was to expand the range of products covered by AGOA, it would deliver huge benefits for the African countries and lead to higher diversification of African exports.
Nor, the research shows, would US producers and exporters suffer. On the contrary it would lead to increased American exports and jobs as African countries look to build up their own economies in new sectors. So it is to be welcomed that Obama, in response to African fears about the future of AGOA, made clear his determination during his trip to encourage Congress not just to renew the agreement post 2015, but to improve it.
We can only hope that his support for AGOA is taken into account during the upcoming 2013 US-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum in Addis Ababa. An enhanced Agoa would provide a powerful drive to deliver his African strategy set out a year ago and would demonstrate US global leadership for years to come.
Carlos Lopes is executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), while Kemal Dervis is vice president and director of Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, and was formerly the head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey
