In the latest escalation of trade wars, the U.S. President has announced further tariff increases on South African imports into the U.S., including a hostile 30 percent import tariff on selected South African goods, effective from 1 August 2025. There are possibilities of an added 10 percent tariff increase due to SA’s connection to the BRICS. The increased tariffs imposed on specific SA exports places many jobs and livelihoods at risk, something that the country cannot afford given persistent levels of mass unemployment.
The U.S. President Donald Trump argues that the tariffs are intended to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with South Africa – i.e., the fact that the U.S. imports more from South Africa than it exports. However, in reality, these tariffs are not about trade balances. It’s economic warfare and forms part of a broader geopolitical confrontation with China, in a renewed push to reinforce the US’s imperialist agenda. At the heart of this agenda is the extraction of critical minerals from the global South and the protection of U.S. industries aimed at bolstering the U.S’s industrial base. The implication will be the continued under-development and deindustrialisation of global South countries, like South Africa.
The U.S’s aggressive trade posture, coupled with the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), makes it clear: South Africa must urgently rethink its economic path. Decades of trade liberalisation to enable an export-led economic model has weakened our industrial base, and has left the South African economy vulnerable to external shocks and global market volatility.
This moment must be a turning point. Instead of negotiating with the US, which is acting in bad faith by not playing by the rules while expecting everyone else to follow the rules, South Africa needs to act decisively.
In the short-term, SA must strengthen regional cooperation and solidarity with countries in Southern Africa, like Lesotho, for example, which declared unemployment a national disaster following the latest announcement of tariff hikes.
More critically, SA needs a structural response anchored in the needs and aspirations of its people. This means:
(1) Breaking from an export-led development path that extracts resources from South Africa at the expense of producing goods that is needed to meet the needs of people living in the country;
(2) Accelerating a national reindustrialisation programme focused on building sovereign productive capacity and developing labour-intensive, value-added industries; and
(3) Prioritising domestic investment in critical public goods such as housing, public transport, agriculture, and energy.
These tariff hikes must serve as a wake-up call. South Africa can no longer afford to rely on an unsustainable development model that compromises our economic sovereignty. Instead, we must rebuild and redirect the economy to serve our people, strengthen democratic control over economic levers, and lay the foundations for a developmental state committed to justice and dignity for all. SA must break from dependency and chart a new course that prioritises a people-centred development path.
For further comment, please contact:
Dominic Brown, AIDC Economic Justice Coordinator on 081 309 4973 or dominic@aidc.org.za
