Trade Agreements

In 2000, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was enacted with a bold promise to serve as the bridge connecting Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to the U.S. market. AGOA was designed to offer unilateral, duty – free access to over 1800 products in the U.S., in addition to the more than 5,000 products that are also eligible for duty-free access under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, to catalyze export-led growth, attract foreign direct investment and accelerate industrialization across Africa. As AGOA was set to lapse in 2025 and following several negotiations for the Agreement’s extension to December 2028, today the verdict is mixed, and the economic landscape tells a complicated story. In this blog, I argue that the question before African policymakers is no longer whether AGOA is renewed, but what the repeated cycle of lapse and extension reveals: that a unilateral preference regime, however long its runway, cannot substitute for the regional integration, rules-of-origin harmonization, and mid-stream industrial capabilities that only Africans can build for themselves.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

The AfCFTA, which aims at setting up a single market for goods and services ‘from Cairo to Cape Town’, is the subject of the eloquent monograph written by Professor Kufuor. The author, a well-known scholar on African legal affairs, has published extensively, inter alia, on world trade, on (the problems of) African integration and on RECs. Therefore, he is eminently qualified to write about the pan-African ‘Trading Order’.

This paper engages in a critical legal analysis of Professor Ian Taylor’s article, Sixty Years Later: Africa’s Stalled Decolonization. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis but will provide a limited legal perspective of the article’s foundational arguments on the underlying causes of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, through a legal lens rooted in intellectual property (IP) law and international investment law (IIL).

Emerging States are urged to be more proactive in treaty making and the language contained therein. In essence, the inclusion of provisions to prevent misuse/ abuse of IPRs and anti-competitive practices in FTAs should be encouraged added to in-depth scrutiny of relevant IP provisions frequently found in TAs and/or that have been identified as bearing particular importance to the generic and biosimilar industries.

The necessity to change the measurement strategy of the AGOA and ACP-EU trade agreements presents a challenge not only to African countries but also to the US and the European Union to establish a common understanding on the need to widen the scope of the measure. All the partners involved require a comprehensive measurement strategy to quantify the real impact of AGOA and ACP-EU on people’s lives.