US secretary of state Hillary Clinton addresses a press conference of the 8th Africa Growth Opportunities Act Forum in Nairobi
Building on a qualified success
By Peter Guest | Published: 28 July, 2010
Ten years after the Clinton administration adopted the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a groundbreaking piece of trade legislation, Agoa’s architects are petitioning to take it a stage further and increase US investment in Africa
On May 18 2000, a piece of legislation was signed in the US that seemed to signal the beginning of a new approach to African development. The African Growth and Opportunity Act opens up US markets, providing tariff free, quota free access to 6,400 items. It was expanded in 2002, under the Bush administration, and again in 2004 and 2006.
Rosa Whitaker, one of the principal architects of the act, explains that the conversations began around the time of the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. A career diplomat, at that time she was an economic officer based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
“Some of us who believed that trade and investment are the best tools for development started reflecting, well, where is the birth of the WTO going to leave Africa?” she says. “Will that help to further marginalise the African nations, or will that bring them into the mainstream of the global economy? What we realised was that it wasn’t really the birth of the WTO that was the issue, it was that our own country, the United States, didn’t have any trade policy or any strong economic development policy towards Africa.”
At the same time, she says, doubts were forming about the efficacy of the US’ aid programmes. The country was delivering billions of dollars to Africa through a variety of mechanisms and results were hard to measure. For Ms Whitaker, however, the epiphany came around the US’ agricultural commodity programmes, which saw donations of grains to African governments, who were expected to sell the produce on and use the money for development financing.
“I was a big fan of this, but when I got on the ground I thought it was quite disingenuous, because really what it was doing was providing a disincentive for local production, it was hurting local farmers and it was basically a means for dumping products into Africa. All of this was quite disturbing to myself and other people,” Ms Whitaker says. “I came to the conclusion – as did many others – that aid was just not working.”
On returning to the US, Ms Whitaker, along with a group of around 10 others from the States and Africa, began lobbying Washington to formulate a dedicated trade policy for the continent. The policy that they drafted was disarmingly simple – quota free and tariff free access to US markets for all goods originating in Africa. Domestic industries would have to petition the government to prove that they would be injured by the legislation. Additionally, each organ of the US government, from agriculture to education to health and human services, would be required to articulate a policy for promoting economic development in Africa.
To do this meant breaking a culture which prejudiced aid above all else when dealing with Africa. “We had an assistant US trade representative for every region of the world, except Africa. And we had it that way because we never saw Africa as a potential trading partner, so we really had a policy based on aid, and the organisational structure of our government was a testament to that,” Ms Whitaker says. When this position was finally created at the end of the Clinton administration, it was she who filled it.
