China is offering Africa certainty. America is offering a deadline.

Within days of President Trump’s signing a one-year extension of the African Growth Opportunity Act — which provides African countries duty-free access to U.S. markets — China announced it would expand its own duty-free treatment to imports from 53 African countries without any such time restriction.

The message couldn’t be clearer: Whereas Beijing offers long-term certainty, Washington is offering Africa another year of doubt.

China is now poised to maintain and magnify its current leading commercial presence in a young and fast-growing continent that demography dictates will become an increasingly important part of the world economy.

Of the 20 countries with the world’s highest growth rates, 12 are in Africa, the world’s second-fastest growing region after Asia. But whereas Asia’s population will soon begin declining, Africa’s is expected to keep increasing, reaching 2.5 billion people by 2050. Total business and consumer spending in Africa will be $6.7 trillion by 2030. Africa’s role as a source of production and consumption, not to mention of energy and critical minerals, is bound to continue growing. Countries in other parts of the world, including the U.S., cannot afford to be sidelined from Africa in the global search for trade, investment, and numerous other commercial opportunities.

So far, China is seizing an outsized share of these opportunities. It is now Africa’s leading trading partner by far. Chinese exports to Africa soared by nearly 26 percent in 2025, to $225 billion. Trade between China and Africa is robust and growing, with China’s exports to Africa increasing significantly due to African demand for such manufactured goods as machinery, electronics, automobiles and other vehicles. In turn, Africa primarily exports raw materials such as crude oil, minerals, and agricultural products to China, resulting in a persistent trade deficit for the African continent.

The opportunity therefore exists for the U.S. to offer Africans a better deal than the Chinese, one that would be more balanced. Such a deal would focus not only on importing much-needed mineral resources but also on the desire of African countries to add value for Africans and their domestic economies in their trade.

Since its enactment in 2000, the African Growth Opportunity Act has been the main channel for increasing two-way trade between the U.S. and Africa, providing African countries duty-free treatment for their shipments of goods to the U.S. for 1,800 products. As Brookings scholars have recently documented, American exports to Africa have quadrupled since the law took effect, with this trade supporting 450,000 American jobs and generating $1 billion annually in benefits for American consumers.

Inexplicably, however, Congress allowed this law to expire last September, even though the Trump administration supported extension. More puzzling, this mistake was not remedied until only a few weeks ago by congressional legislation, now signed into law by Trump. Yet instead of extending it for another decade or more, as some lawmakers had sought, this new law only extends it until the end of this year. Thus, any celebration of the extension was largely muted, as both sides of U.S.-African trade relations are left wondering what comes next.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are not leaving anyone to wonder about their intentions for African trade. A few days after Trump signed the temporary extension, China countered by announcing that it will expand its own duty-free treatment for Chinese imports from Africa from 33 to 53 African countries, with no time limit.

Further diminishing the importance of the African Growth Opportunity Act extension is that — again, to U.S. detriment — these African countries are now facing the new 15-percent global tariff the president imposed following the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overrule Trump’s earlier round of “reciprocal” tariffs. So, despite the extension, African exports to the U.S. do not enjoy duty-free treatment. It is a loss for both sides.

Ours is a time when many apparently obvious policy decisions have become controversial. One salient example is a permanent extension of the African Growth Opportunity Act. Equally sound would be to review it less frequently, expand it through broader product coverage, add to it new sectors of agreement — on critical minerals, digital trade, services, nontariff trade barriers, and more — and make its benefits more accessible to Americans and Africans alike through simplified rules of origin, reduced administrative costs, and various forms of trade facilitation that would ease and enhance the two-way flow of goods and services.

Trump says he wants more benefits from the African Growth Opportunity Act. This is the right goal. But to secure these added benefits, the United States should extend it not for another year but for another generation.

If the U.S. wants to compete effectively with China in Africa — and to support African aspirations for value-added growth rather than perpetual commodity dependence — it must offer what markets value most: stability. A permanent or long-term extension of this law would signal that America intends to be a reliable economic partner, not a fair-weather one.

James Bacchus is an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, a former member of the U.S. Congress, a former chairman of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization, and the author, most recently, of “Democracy for a Sustainable World.”

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