The Open Market

The problem

The African Growth and Opportunity Act is the best trade policy the United States has toward Africa and the least reliable. Enacted in 2000, it admits more than 6,000 products from 32 eligible sub-Saharan countries into the American market without duty: apparel from Lesotho and Kenya, cocoa products from Ghana, cut flowers from Ethiopia, vehicles from South Africa. Trade under the Act runs on the order of $10 billion a year and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs on the continent, most of them in factories that exist because the duty-free door exists.

The door has a timer. The Act has been extended in 2004, 2006, 2015 and again in early 2026, each time after a period in which no one in Africa could be sure it would be. On September 30, 2025 it expired, and for four months the factories that depend on it paid full duty and their American buyers looked elsewhere; in early 2026 Congress extended it for one year, to December 31, 2026, retroactively. A buyer placing an order for next spring's collection does not know today whether the duty will be zero or 30 percent when it lands. A developer deciding whether to build a second factory in Maseru knows only that the law dies again in December.

Eligibility is the second uncertainty. Each year the President reviews every country against criteria, market economy, rule of law, human rights, and may remove a country from the list; Ethiopia, Mali, Guinea and others have been removed and sometimes restored. The criteria are reasonable and the process is discretionary, which means a country's access to the American market can end by a decision in Washington that no one in the country saw coming and no rule required. Leverage of that kind is useful once. As a permanent condition of trade it is a reason to build the factory somewhere else.

№ 006 proposed that America underwrite Africa's buildout and Africans own it. The buildout needs somewhere to sell. This proposal is the door, without the timer.

The proposal

The Open Market: duty-free access for the products of the Act is made permanent, with no expiration, terminable for any country only on ten years' notice. Eligibility is determined by a published scorecard with fixed criteria and automatic, appealable consequences, in place of the annual presidential review. Rules of origin are loosened so that a garment sewn in Africa qualifies whatever the fabric's source. And the partners of the Marshall Compact commit, over twenty years, to open their own markets to American goods on a published schedule.

How it would work

1. Permanent. The Act's preferences are written into the tariff schedule without a sunset. A country's access may be withdrawn only under item 2, and the whole programme may be ended only by a law with ten years' notice, so that no factory is built on a preference that a Congress can let lapse by inaction.

1. The scorecard. Eligibility is scored annually against the Act's existing criteria by a published method, with the score, the evidence and the threshold public. A country that falls below the threshold receives notice, a year to respond, and an appeal to a panel; withdrawal follows only if the score does not recover. The President may still suspend a country for a coup or a gross violation, on a published finding, for a fixed term. What ends is the quiet annual discretion.

1. Origin. A garment sewn in an eligible country qualifies regardless of where the fabric was woven, as the Act's third-country fabric provision already allows for the poorest countries, made permanent and universal. The rule that has kept African apparel competitive is the one most often threatened at each renewal.

1. The reciprocity. Members of the Marshall Compact commit, as a condition of the Compact's guarantees under № 111 and № 116, to reduce their own tariffs on American goods to zero over twenty years on a published schedule, with the agricultural and infant-industry exceptions the Compact negotiates in the open. The Open Market becomes, over a generation, a free-trade area rather than a preference, on terms the African side sets the pace of.

1. The African market too. The African Continental Free Trade Area, which the continent's governments have been building since 2018, is the larger prize, and the Open Market's rules of origin treat goods that move within it as African for the purpose of the American door. A car assembled in Ghana from parts made in Nigeria and South Africa is an African car.

1. Published. Trade under the Act by country and product, the scorecard, and the reciprocity schedule, on one page a year.

The numbers

The trade. On the order of $10 billion a year under the Act, a small share of American imports and a large share of the manufactured exports of Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia and Madagascar. American exports to the 32 countries are of similar scale.

The jobs. Estimates of employment supported by the Act run to hundreds of thousands on the continent, concentrated in apparel, where a single lapse of four months in 2025 cost orders that did not return.

The cost. The duty forgone is on the order of a few hundred million dollars a year, which is what the Act already costs; permanence costs nothing more. The reciprocity in item 4 is, over twenty years, a gain to American exporters in a market of 1.4 billion people.

The comparison. The European Union's preferences for the same countries do not expire, and China admits the products of the poorest African countries duty-free under a programme that has expanded at every China-Africa summit. The United States is the only major market whose door has a timer.

The honest objections

"The annual review is America's leverage on human rights and governance." It is leverage that has been used sparingly, unpredictably and, by the accounts of the countries affected, mostly as a reason to hedge. The scorecard in item 2 keeps the criteria and the consequences and makes them a rule: a government knows what the threshold is, sees its score, and has a year and an appeal. That is more leverage, not less, because it is credible.

"Permanent preferences violate trade rules and invite challenges." Unilateral preferences for developing countries are permitted under the trade rules' enabling clause and have been for fifty years. The reciprocity in item 4 moves the arrangement toward a free-trade agreement over twenty years, which is the form the rules most clearly permit.

"American textile workers lose to duty-free African apparel." The American apparel industry lost to Asia in the 1990s, and the African share of American apparel imports is a few percent. The choice for a garment buyer is not between Lesotho and North Carolina; it is between Lesotho and Bangladesh, and the Open Market is the reason it is sometimes Lesotho.

"Asking African countries to open their markets to American goods is the old colonial bargain." It is the bargain every free-trade agreement contains, on a twenty-year schedule the African side paces, with exceptions negotiated in public and a continental market treated as one origin. A partnership in which one side gives and the other only receives is not the model this catalog proposes; the Marshall Compact is co-ownership, and co-ownership runs both ways.

"Congress will never give up the renewal, because the renewal is where it exerts control." It will give up the renewal when it is shown what the renewal costs: four months of full duty in 2025, a decade of factories not built, and a Chinese programme that expands while the American one expires. Item 1's ten-year notice keeps Congress's power to end the programme. It removes its power to end it by forgetting.

Sources

• Congressional Research Service, African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) (IF10149); Office of the United States Trade Representative, AGOA eligibility and trade data
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, AGOA's Short-Term Renewal May Not Be a Long-Term Win (2026); Center for Strategic and International Studies, AGOA's Uncertain Future (2025)
• Quincy Institute, US–Africa Trade and the National Interest: Why AGOA Is a Sound Long-Term Bet (2025)
• African Union, African Continental Free Trade Area, agreement and implementation reports
• Proposals № 006 (The Marshall Compact); № 069 (The Tariff Trust); № 111 (The Six Hundred Million); № 116 (The Refinancing Hand)