Has Trump finally found a foreign trade deal he can get behind?

Tucked away in the funding package passed by Congress this week is a provision that extends the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) through the end of 2028.

The two-year extension of AGOA — a preferential trade deal that offers eligible sub-Saharan countries duty-free access to the U.S. market for thousands of goods — answers the White House’s request that the agreement be extended on a short-term basis while negotiations take place over its long-term future.

Originally signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 2000 to improve U.S. trade relations with sub-Saharan Africa, AGOA has had a topsy-turvy past year. Trump’s strong disapproval of preferential trade agreements led many Africa watchers to assume that AGOA was going to lapse without any effort by the administration to extend it past its September 2025 expiration. But just a day before the agreement expired, Trump came out in support of a short-term extension and expressed a desire to begin negotiations over what a long-term AGOA should look like.

Competing bills were presented in Congress late last year for AGOA’s extension, including one sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) which included a provision that would have called for the review of the bilateral U.S.-South Africa relationship. This came in the wake of Trump’s spat with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa over the country’s handling of what the American president called, without providing proof, a “genocide” against the country’s white population.

In the end, an AGOA extension (which did not include a bilateral review for South Africa) was signed into law in February, keeping the act in force until the end of this year and providing retroactive AGOA benefits to goods that had been sold during the months between its expiration and renewal.

Now, with this new two-year extension, negotiations over the act’s long-term future can finally take place.

Trump’s support for a long-term AGOA stands in contrast to his general opposition to preferential trade deals, which he has criticized for their tendency to remove tariffs on foreign companies exporting to the United States without providing the same level of benefit to American exporters. This, Trump has complained, worsens the U.S. trade balance (by increasing imports without increasing exports), consequently making American companies less competitive with foreign sellers that can produce goods more cheaply and thus undercut the prices of American-produced goods. (Of course, lost in the hoopla over the trade balance is that these cheaper imports — and the wider range of options in a competitive market — benefit American consumers.)

Trump’s team has been outspoken in its pursuit of a long-term AGOA that provides more reciprocal benefits to the United States. In practice, this most likely means that the administration will push for a long-term agreement where African countries reduce or eliminate tariffs facing U.S. exporters in a similar vein to the benefits offered by the United States to sub-Saharan exporters.

But these negotiations require nuance and complexity. American demands for greater trade reciprocity need to take into consideration how AGOA actually benefits its African partners, or else African exporters will turn elsewhere. Although AGOA has quite noticeably benefited certain African sectors — such as textiles and apparel — its benefits aren’t substantial enough to offset the cost that African countries would incur if they were to remove tariffs on thousands of goods at the request of the Trump administration. The widespread removal of tariffs would decrease revenue for African governments struggling to repay high levels of sovereign debt and hurt local companies that can’t achieve economies of scale to the same extent that larger American companies can. Such a move would render many African companies unable to compete with a new slate of American exporters entering their countries duty-free.

And although accessing the huge American market remains a major goal of African sellers, the truth is that they now have a much wider international consumer base than in years past, which decreases American leverage.

The Chinese government has given all African countries, except Eswatini (which recognizes Taiwan as an independent country), duty-free access for all exports to China. Unlike the U.S. trade deal, these agreements apply to all exported goods without requiring African partners to meet governance and human rights standards, nor forcing them to remove tariffs facing Chinese exporters. And African countries are also beginning to trade with each other at a much higher clip, especially now that the African Continental Free Trade Area, which aims to create an Africa-wide customs union, is beginning to take shape.

The schizophrenic nature of AGOA’s stop-start renewals over the past year has already hindered U.S.-Africa trade relations, with African exports to the U.S. dropping sharply during the months AGOA had lapsed. Talks about reciprocity alongside Trump’s heavy tariffs have increased pessimism among experts about what benefits a long-term agreement might actually provide Africans.

Continuing to push heavy demands on sub-Saharan countries for reciprocity could backfire, as many would-be African partners might increasingly turn to China and alternative markets, where they can reach a wide base of consumers without being forced to jump through hoops put in place by Washington.

Although the administration is right to aim for a long-term agreement, it should do so while taking into consideration the current, competitive geopolitical moment, and the real needs of African countries to access new markets and deepen supply chains.