In the factories and agro-processing plants of South Africa, the jobs that could lift families out of poverty are being quietly priced out of existence. That is the warning from economist Maarten van Doesburgh, who argues that the tariff system now taking shape around the country is pushing it back toward an old, familiar role: a supplier of raw rocks to wealthier nations.
Van Doesburgh, head of Economics at CPUT, chief executive of Economics Investment Group and a regular commentator on the country’s economic landscape, says the real danger in Washington’s annual review of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) is not the headline export figures dominating the news. It is a slower, deeper wound to the livelihoods of ordinary working people.
His central concern is simple to state and heavy in its consequences. Under the current Agoa and United States tariff structures, manufactured consumer goods, automotive parts and high-value agricultural products face immediate and aggressive tariff walls if South Africa loses full Agoa eligibility or as separate penalising Section 301 tariffs bite harder. Those walls could price South African factories out of the global market, and with them the assembly lines, agro-processing plants and value-added production that actually employ people.
Meanwhile, the things the world genuinely wants from South Africa pass through untouched. Gold, platinum group metals, manganese, iron ore and even coal face no penalising tariffs, whether the buyer is in Washington or Beijing. The great powers want those raw commodities to power their own factories, sustain their own high-tech industries and grow their own economies. The result, Van Doesburgh writes, is an artificial funnel: it becomes cheap and frictionless to remain a primary-commodity exporter, and prohibitively expensive to become a manufacturing economy.
For workers and communities, that asymmetry is everything. “You cannot solve our huge unemployment crisis by shipping unrefined rocks to foreign ports,” he argues. Jobs are created in factories, in agro-processing and in the high-value assembly lines that turn raw minerals into advanced components. A trade regime that taxes finished goods while waving raw materials through is, in his words, a system that kills local employment.
The human stakes stretch far beyond the next quarterly export report. Van Doesburgh acknowledges that high commodity prices may currently hand the National Treasury a temporary revenue cushion, a point he addressed last week. But commodity cycles are notoriously fickle; they boom and then inevitably bust. When they do, a country that has leaned ever more heavily on raw exports is left with depleted mines, a degraded environment and an unskilled workforce, hollowed out for the long term.
He is equally blunt about his own government’s role in this trap, which he describes as a matter of sheer inertia. Van Doesburgh has repeatedly criticised Pretoria for failing to prioritise real, aggressive economic growth. Instead of fostering dynamic public-private partnerships to unlock massive private investment, repairing collapsing logistics rail lines and supercharging local factories, he says the state has sat on its hands, content to rely on cyclical mining windfalls to bail out the budget deficit.
The broader worry is what this means for the country’s independence. In a recent column for Sunday World, published at https://sundayworld.co.za/columns/the-agoa-trap-how-western-tariffs-are-forcing-south-africa-back-into-a-colonial-economic-corner/, Van Doesburgh describes the Agoa threat as not merely a diplomatic headache but a structural assault on South Africa’s economic sovereignty. If the country’s response to Western tariff pressures, or to pivots toward Eastern markets, is simply to shrug and export more raw minerals to compensate for lost vehicle and citrus markets, he contends, the nation is moving backward, not forward.
His argument rests on a conviction he says he has expressed repeatedly in these pages: that the only viable path to genuine economic liberation, substantial GDP growth and a fairer distribution of income runs through robust local manufacturing, value-added production and high-tier services. A country that digs up its wealth, ships it off in raw form and then buys it back as expensive finished goods is, he writes, actively exporting its own prosperity and its people’s jobs. The windfalls from that trade flow straight into multinational mining coffers, not into the communities that live with the mines.
His prescription is correspondingly direct. South Africans must stop measuring the health of their economy by the size of a commodity windfall, he writes, and instead aggressively resist the global trade trap. If the world wants South African minerals, it should also have to buy them increasingly as finished products. Breaking that cycle, unlocking private sector potential and building a country that creates its own value, on its own soil and for its own people, is in his view the only durable answer. Anything less, he warns, means accepting a place back in a colonial-era economic corner, with the nation’s wealth leaving in raw form and its people waiting for jobs that never arrive.