AGOA at its core is an extension of its Generalized System of Preferences  (GSP) package, which already had numerous African beneficiaries. The list of 4,600 products that the GSP contains was extended through the AGOA legislation to include another 2,000 or so previously excluded tariff line items, including footwear, certain agricultural products, some automotive components, and most importantly clothing.

The impact is reflected in the trade data: in 2000, the year of AGOA’s inception, exports from eligible Sub-Saharan African countries were worth at 17 billion dollars. Of this, less than four per cent qualified under the GSP and none (yet) under AGOA. In 2005, US-bound exports from AGOA beneficiaries have increased to 47 billion dollars (it should be noted that Angola, a major oil exporter, gained eligibility in the interim).

Of this, the proportion of goods shipped under GSP has grown to 11pc, while the newly added AGOA categories - a measure of the real benefit of AGOA - account for 70pc. No program is claimed for the remaining exports, although it is submitted that most of these already have duty-free status under most favoured nation (MFN) commitments, or simply do not require trade preferences to help achieve market access (for example, certain petroleum products). Based on this data, AGOA has been a resounding success.
 

But trade under AGOA remains highly concentrated. Remove energy-related exports and one is left with substantially reduced trade volumes. Take out South Africa, and immediately AGOA’s scorecard shows that far from being the model of unilateral engagement on trade, the Act’s reach has been somewhat more limited. Notwithstanding, AGOA has assisted numerous African economies to participate in international trade, and in the case of clothing manufacture, to build and sustain a sector that has far-reaching implications for economic upgrading and employment creation.
 

When AGOA was enacted, US policymakers appeared mindful of the fact that aid alone would not help develop Africa. By promoting trade through preferential market access and favorable rules of origin, AGOA helped set Africa on a different path of economic development and integration with its own and the world economy.
 

But US policy was implicitly (as well as explicitly in the AGOA legislation, and contained in notifications by the US Trade Representative to Congress) interested in engaging Africa in a much more structured and balanced manner, particularly through the conclusion of preferential trade agreements. AGOA, it must be remembered, offered unilateral and time-bound preferences that were subject to ongoing Congressional scrutiny; they could be amended or withdrawn at virtually a moment’s notice - as happened to Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritania and Eritrea - with little recourse to any dispute settlement mechanism.
 

AGOA offered US policymakers the platform for a deeper relationship - with emphasis on deeper economic engagement rather than simply based on enhanced trade in goods - and its efforts initially focused on the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).
 

SACU as a whole has been to date one of the key beneficiaries of AGOA benefits - if trade in petroleum products is taken out of the picture - and would benefit from a more secured bilateral trade framework within which to build two-way trade with the US. Likewise for the US, SACU presented a potentially huge market for its goods and services, if not investment, and intellectual property rights.

While SACU negotiates trade agreements as a single entity, as mandated by the 2002 SACU Agreement, this should hardly provide a disincentive or stumbling block for US business (as expressed through the US government’s approach to trade policy), as accessing say the South African market provides a cost-effective and strategic entry point into the Southern African region as a whole.
 

Ultimately, US-SACU trade negotiators failed to agree on a framework within which to conclude a preferential trade agreement, and were all but abandoned by mid-2006. While SACU was pushing for a more traditional approach, covering mainly trade in goods, the US insisted on a much broader WTO-plus type agreement encompassing a broad range of issues. These include competition and regulation, intellectual property rights, trade in services, government procurement, trade facilitation and even labor and environmental standards.
 

In the absence of harmonized policies within SACU to govern these issues, let alone appropriate institutions to implement them, negotiations on this type of comprehensive agreement were bound to fail.
 

Had the SACU-US negotiations been concluded and based largely on the US model agreement, given some of the limitations mentioned above, SACU countries may have found themselves in a highly constrained policy space with regard to the US. For example, the latter has strong offensive interest in a range of issues, including water, electricity and health (and in these instances by extension government procurement and intellectual property rights), issues that are deemed strategic commodities and as such not simply tradable at any cost. Investor-state arbitration is likewise an example where appropriate guarantees under a comprehensive US model agreement may undermine socio-economic development objectives and expose governments of partner states to drawn out legal challenges from private investors.
 

But while African countries build on their historic trade ties with Europe, and take advantage of preferences under AGOA, intense interest is being shown by China. While early relations between China and Africa during the 1960s and 1970s took place mainly within a much more confined policy environment, and evolved not so much around trade ties but rather an extension of the East’s ideo-political sphere of influence in Africa, the China of today seen in Africa a much more strategic economic partner.
 

China’s economy has for the past decade recorded rapid economic expansion (lately exceeding 10pc annually) and Africa is viewed as an important partner not only as a source of raw materials, but as a largely untapped continent of opportunity for Chinese investments. Across Africa, Chinese entrepreneurs and state-owned enterprises are taking their claim, unbound by the rigid moral, institutional and legal framework within which the West is engaging with Africa.
 

In practice, China does not link investment flows, loan finance or development aid to say human rights or environmental principles, making the country an attractive trade and investment partner to many of the countries long shunned by the West.
 

There is little doubt that competing Chinese interest in Africa is influencing US trade policy (although it is submitted that politically, Africa likewise forms an increasingly important partner). As a market for goods and services, Africa is still largely underdeveloped and presents massive opportunities. First-mover advantage, far from being merely a textbook business principle, is a reality in the African context, especially now that an increasing number of countries are emerging from protracted civil strife, have relatively stable political systems in place or are even nearing their first decade of constitution-based multi-party democracy.
 

At the recent AGOA Forum, an annual event that brings together a wide range of economic, political and civil society stakeholders from across Africa as well as the US, there were early indications that the US is engaging in a subtle yet important policy shift towards Africa. In essence, US trade policy on Africa appears to be shifting away from the provision of unilateral preferences (notwithstanding the fact that AGOA, in its current guise, is set to expire only in 2015) to a more bilateral and appropriately weighted relationship.
 

The US argues that the value of one-way preferences is steadily declining, for example due to preference erosion in the multilateral trade environment, including under the Doha Development Round and other WTO commitments, and even in the context of the recent expiry of the Multifibre Arrangement on Textiles and Clothing.
 

Within this shifting policy environment the US also appears to be moving away from the rigid policy framework it pursued over the past few years to a more scaled-back and subtle form of engagement. All but abandoning its policy of WTO-plus type agreements with Africa for now, the US is acknowledging that this type of arrangement would at least in the medium term find few suitors in Africa, and that any formal trade and investment-related arrangements would need to implicitly recognize this fact.
 

While holding on to its core objective of US “model” agreements in the long term, the US would in the meantime pursue much more broadly-principled trade and investment framework agreements. In other words, rather than abandoning its policy of seeking stronger ties with Africa, US policy appears to seek a more mutually acceptable approach to pursuing its objectives.
 

Of course, questions may be raised on the timing and direction of US trade and investment policy, not only in the context of the perceived (and actual) threat emanating from China, but of critical importance also with respect to parallel developments between Europe and the ACP countries (of which Africa forms the largest component in terms of absolute numbers and regional groupings).
 

Sub-Saharan African countries - beneficiaries of AGOA - are currently pursuing Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) negotiations with the EU, and for this purpose have organized themselves into various geographic configurations. Despite a slow process fraught with logistical and organizational challenges, let alone regional policy divergence and at times unclear common negotiating agendas, these EPA negotiations may in fact cover some of the groundwork for deeper engagement with the US.
 

The laborious and often painful process currently underway of developing common positions at the regional level and between countries as vastly different as those in Africa, are unlikely to have gone unnoticed by US policymakers and could in fact be playing a not insignificant part in the changing US policy environment in relation to Africa.
 

But while the US remodels its engagement with Africa and moves to a more scaled back approach, rather than the somewhat heavy-handed advances of the past, an opportunity is emerging for Africa to build capacity in key areas. By placing a much more dedicated emphasis on strengthening domestic disciplines and institutions in key areas such as investment, competition and intellectual property rights, to name but a few, African countries will be better equipped to make their own markets work. This will allow for an improved trading relationship not only with the US but with other trade partners too.

The extent to which African countries ultimately gain from a deeper future engagement with the US in the post-AGOA era depends largely on how well they leverage not only their position as an attractive economic destination for US trade and investment, but as well-equipped, skilled, confident and astute partners in any future negotiation process.