Lesotho's trade minister said on Wednesday that the US plans to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives the continent preferential access to US markets, by a year, after returning from a visit to Washington.
A slew of tariffs that US President Donald Trump imposed on global trading partners on April 4 hit African countries hard. They were widely seen as the death knell for the quarter-century-old AGOA deal, putting millions of livelihoods at risk, said Reuters.
Lesotho initially got hit with the world's highest tariff of 50% on Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" - ruinous for the tiny mountain kingdom's export-led development model, which was almost entirely dependent on textile factories selling jeans and T-shirts to the US.
Trump reduced it to 15% in August. A Lesotho trade delegation visited the US from September 15-19.
Minister of Trade, Industry and Business Development Mokhethi Shelile, who led the delegation, told a news conference late on Wednesday that they met US officials responsible for AGOA on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
"They all agreed that AGOA has to be extended and they promised us that by November or December the latest, it will be extended by a year," Shelile said.
AGOA expires on September 30 and companies that benefit from it have warned that any delay in renewing it risked significant job losses and factory closures.
Lesotho qualifies for textile and apparel benefits under AGOA, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. US goods and services trade with Lesotho totaled $276 million in 2024, up 4.6% from a year earlier.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"We will be ... monitoring closely ... that the extension comes into force as promised, because if it doesn't, we are risking losing more jobs," Shelile said.
A spokesman for Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, who are led by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, told Reuters: "The Trump administration hasn't informed Finance Committee Democrats its position on renewing AGOA. Ranking Member Wyden continues to support renewing the program."
