Pretoria | Tuesday
SOUTH Africa will hold talks with its neighbours to promote a regional free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States amid “general support” for the plan, Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin said on Monday.
Speaking after lengthy talks with US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in Pretoria, Erwin said South Africa’s partners in the Southern African Customs Union Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland were interested in holding general discussions.
“There is general support to explore the possibility and what we intend doing is to hold discussions with the SA Customs Unions very soon and then go back to the US indicating our view. The first step would be consultation,” Erwin said.
Zoellick confirmed US interest in the possibility of an FTA.
“We think the FTA is a very interesting idea. I emphasised that if we can decide to proceed on this, we certainly see it as a device that would help to support regional integration in southern Africa,” Zoellick said.
However, this did not mean discussions would be easy.
“No-one underestimates the difficulties of these. When we engage in them, the United States looks to a very comprehensive, full agreement but because of that it also offers benefits to our partners in terms of investment and linkage to their own format for region integration,” he said.
The US currently has free trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, Israel and Jordan and is engaged in talks with Singapore and Chile.
Erwin confirmed he had raised the thorny questions of threatened US tariffs on South African steel and similar anti-dumping duties imposed by South Africa on imports of poultry from the United States.
“We dealt with the contentious issues … of steel and poultry. We presented our position to the US administration and expect them to make a decision fairly soon. We tried to reach some kind of understanding on the issue of poultry. We are hopeful should be able to reach some kind of understanding on this in the next few days,” he said.
On steel, Zoellick said a decision on whether to proceed with tariffs was expected on March 6.
“If the president does make the decision, there are various ways for him to structure it. Our International Trade Commission (ITC) made various recommendations … and there are specific provisions relating to developing countries. We are fortunate in having a good sense of South African industry and have the data that we need to proceed. That is one of the things that we verified here.”
On poultry, Zoellick said he hoped to have follow-up discussions in the “next couple of days.
“It is a very important issue to us just as our anti-dumping laws are for others because it is important that certain procedures and standards be followed. But we also recognise that poultry is a very sensitive industry.”
Zoellick, who is on the second leg of the first African tour by a top trade official from Washington, has been to Kenya and was due on Wednesday to leave for Botswana to assess HIV/Aids research and treatment there. – AFP