Washington’s flagship trade preference programme was rescued in February and expires again on 31 December. For most of Central Africa, the deadline is academic: the region was already locked out.
On 3 February 2026, President Trump signed legislation reauthorising the African Growth and Opportunity Act through 31 December 2026, retroactive to 30 September 2025, when the previous authorisation had lapsed. It was a rescue, not a renewal: a one-year extension attached to an appropriations bill, after the House had voted 340-54 in January for a three-year version that never became law on its own.
Who is actually in
The detail that matters for this magazine is eligibility. Of the six CEMAC states, only Chad and the Republic of Congo are inside the tent. Cameroon was removed on 1 January 2020 over human rights violations. The Central African Republic is out on the same grounds. Equatorial Guinea is not even considered, having graduated out of the US Generalised System of Preferences on income grounds.
Gabon is the exception, and the good news story. Suspended from 1 January 2024 after the coup, it was re-designated a beneficiary country with effect from 1 January 2026, reflected in the US tariff schedule.
Why the deadline still matters
Three reasons. First, Gabon has eleven months to build something on a preference it has just recovered, which in practice means manganese-based products, wood and processed goods. Second, a one-year horizon is useless for investors: nobody builds an apparel plant on a twelve-month tariff line. Third, the pattern of exclusion tells its own story. Central Africa’s absence from AGOA has less to do with Washington than with the region’s inability to export anything to the US market beyond crude oil, which pays no duty anyway.
The question for December
Congress will decide again before the year ends. Whatever it decides, the strategic answer for the region lies elsewhere: in the African Continental Free Trade Area, and in the Asian markets that now buy most of what Central Africa sells.
