{"id":23993,"date":"2026-01-15T01:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/23993\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T01:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:22:12","slug":"trade-minister-parks-tau-welcomes-us-house-approval-of-agoa-renewal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/23993\/","title":{"rendered":"Trade minister Parks Tau welcomes US House approval of Agoa renewal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph\">The government on Tuesday welcomed the approval by the US House of Representatives of a bill that would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.timeslive.co.za\/news\/africa\/2026-01-13-us-house-approves-agoa-extension-sends-bill-to-senate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.timeslive.co.za\/news\/africa\/2026-01-13-us-house-approves-agoa-extension-sends-bill-to-senate\/\">renew Washington\u2019s preferential trade programme for Africa<\/a> for another three years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">The African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), a law first enacted in 2000 to provide duty-free access to the US market for eligible sub-Saharan countries and products, expired in September. Hundreds of thousands of African jobs are estimated to depend on it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Trade and industry minister Parks Tau said in a statement that renewing Agoa would \u201cprovide certainty and predictability for African and American businesses that rely on the programme\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">He said Africa\u2019s biggest economy was still negotiating with the US over a bilateral trade deal, even though relations with Washington have soured badly during President Donald Trump\u2019s second term in office.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">The bill to extend Agoa will next go to the Senate before going to Trump for his consideration.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The government on Tuesday welcomed the approval by the US House of Representatives of a bill that would&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[8212,14702,2253,14701,131,263,4403,592],"class_list":{"0":"post-23993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-south-africa","8":"tag-agoa","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-house-of-representatives","11":"tag-parks-tau","12":"tag-south-africa","13":"tag-trade","14":"tag-trump","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}