SUNS  4368 Friday 5 February 1999

Washington, Feb 4 (IPS/Jim Lobe) -- A bill to promote US trade and investment in Africa, which last year fell victim to powerful textile and labour interests, has exploded to a fast new start through
Congress.

A key subcommittee of the House of Representatives Wednesday unanimously approved the latest version of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), after concluding a session of overwhelmingly favourable testimony.

Managers of the bill said they planned to have the entire House of Representatives, which passed the bill by a large margin last March, approve it Feb. 23. It would then go to the Senate - where it bogged down last year.

Congressional staffers working on the bill believed they had a better chance of prevailing over textile interests in the Senate this year.
"There are a lot more people involved in this now," said Mike Williams, a key strategist behind the bill.

That support was evident on Capitol Hill. Secretary of Commerce William Daley was joined by top corporate executives, ambassadors from Senegal Mauritius, and Uganda, former US ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, and former Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp in appealing for swift passage of the bill.

Opposing the bill were Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., who offered his own "Hope for Africa Act" and representatives of textile interests who played a key role in stopping the bill last year in the Senate.

The Act, which has been opposed by some labour groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), is designed to boost US commercial interests in sub-Saharan Africa, a region long dominated by former colonial powers.

Economic ties between the United States and the continent have been minimal. US exports to the region account for only about one percent of total US exports, while African imports here - mostly oil from Angola and Nigeria - account for only about two percent of all imports.

At the same time, US investment in Africa - deployed mostly in South Africa and Nigeria - remains less than one percent of all US investment overseas.

Among other provisions, the bill would substantially increase the number of African-made goods that could enter the US market duty-free. It also authorised the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to provide some 650 million dollars in investment guarantees and credits for US companies doing business in Africa, notably for infrastructure projects and sets up new forums for African and US business interests to meet and cooperate.

Clinton tried hard to get the bill passed last year before his unprecedented, 11-day trip to the region late last March. The law was billed as a tangible expression of US commitment to Africa in the
post-Cold War era. Administration officials said they welcomed the unusually fast action on the bill by the powerful House Ways and Means Committee particularly in light of rising criticism from within Africa. This followed Washington's failure to follow up Clinton's trip with major new initiatives and its apparent helplessness to prevent the outbreak or spread of conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, and between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
There still remained opposition to the bill focused on the conditions which would have to be met for interested African nations to benefit from the act. To be eligible, countries would have to make "continual progress toward establishing a market-based economy."

Such progress would be measured, among other factors, by compliance with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), liberalisation of trade and investment regimes, and protection of foreign investment and intellectual property rights.

NGOs here and in Africa have previously objected to such criteria, alleging that they favoured the interests of multinational companies and foreign investors at the expense of the vast number of poor Africans. Even South African President Mandela last year denounced some of these conditions as "unacceptable," although Pretoria's ambassador here eventually endorsed the  legislation.

Indeed, those "conditionalities" were at the heart of Rep. Jackson's critique of AGOA and the spur for his own Hope for Africa Act which he said Wednesday was the product of six months of consultations among US and African NGOs.

His bill called for a new approach to Africa based on unconditional cancellation of the region's 230-billion-dollar external debt, an increase in US aid to Africa to 1994 levels, the limitation of tariff preferences for products made by African-owned companies which respect international labour and environmental standards.

In written testimony, Jackson, the son of one of Clinton's top Africa advisers, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, charged that the "economic neo-colonialism" behind AGOA would make it "better for Africa to have  no bill at all than to have this bill pass" - an assertion that drew a scathing reply from the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee and dean of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Charles Rangel.

"Do you believe that you would know better than the (40 African ambassadors) who have worked for this bill," asked Rangel, who said that, while he was sympathetic to some of the policies contained in Jackson's bill, it had no chance of gaining the bipartisan support needed for passage.

That represented the view of many US NGOs here who last year were divided over whether to support the AGOA and who now believed that their efforts to amend it during the legislative process would be undermined by Jackson's bill.

"Our voice is going to be drowned out by his," said one lobbyist for a prominent Africa human-rights lobby, who asked not to be identified.

The bill appeared certain to run into resistance in the Senate where textile interests were stronger. They succeeded last year in amending provisions that would give duty- and quota-free access to textiles and apparel imported from eligible countries to require that all such products be made by US-produced fabrics and materials.

Calling such an amendment "totally unjustified," Republican Sen.Phil Gramm, who greed to sponsor the AGOA in the Senate, said, "if you don't drop that provision, you kill the bill."

Gramm noted that a study by the Commerce Department's International Trade Commission found that unrestricted imports of African-made textiles and apparel would have a "minuscule" impact on jobs in the United States.