South Africa Exports at Risk as US Tariff Hiatus Nears End

(A shorter version of this economic note was published in Business Day on 2 July 2025.) South African (SA) exporters to the United States of America (USA) are facing an impending crisis with the 90-day suspension of President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ reciprocal tariffs scheduled to lapse on the 9 th of July 2025. The immediate concern is the increase in tariffs from the current ‘universal’ baseline tariff of 10% to a SA-specific reciprocal tariff of 30%. These tariffs are in addition to the Section 232 tariffs on steel & aluminium (50%) and automobiles (25%) that President Trump imposed for national security reasons this year. For South Africa, the US is a key export partner, accounting for 8.5% of non-gold exports in 2024. Gold is excluded as it is not reported in SA bilateral trade statistics and enters duty free into the US. Additionally, a third of SA non-gold exports to the US entered under AGOA preferences last year. However, AGOA preferences offer little cushion against the current tariffs. For example, South Africa’s top US-bound product, passenger vehicles, enjoyed a 2.5% tariff preference under AGOA, which is largely rendered meaningless by the 25% Section 232 tariffs on automobile imports. Similarly, the prospective 30% reciprocal tariff swamps the savings of 1.9 US cent per kilogram enjoyed by exporters of citrus products to the US under AGOA. To assess the implications of the US tariffs on imports from SA, we develop a highly disaggregated multi-country, product-level trade and tariff model drawing on US reported import data for 2024. This model accounts for all new tariffs imposed on SA and other countries in 2025, as well as products exempted from the reciprocal tariffs (e.g. platinum group metals, selected wood products, ferro-alloys, copper, manganese and selected electronic goods). This model allows us to simulate the impact of the tariff increases on US imports from SA. Our analysis shows that SA is particularly vulnerable to the lapsing of th