U.S. and Hong Kong (2007)

U.S. Department of State

Scene Setter for the Sixth AGOA Forum

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Acting Assistant Administrator for African Affairs, USAID Walter North; Ghana Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater and Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa Florizelle Liser
Foreign Press Center Briefing
Washington, DC
May 18, 2007

10:00 A.M. EDT

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MR. NORTH: Thank you very much and thanks to my colleagues from the other parts of the U.S. Government that are here this morning. We're very pleased, of course, to participate in the AGOA forum. I think it's part of another milestone and a very widespread effort within our government to support trade capacity-building and dialogue and economic growth in Africa.

USAID itself is responsible for helping to ramp up the assistance that we're providing in the area of technical capacity-building. As many of you may know, in Hong Kong, about -- it was a year-and-a-half ago, we committed to doubling our trade capacity-building assistance through the U.S. Government to $2.6 billion over the next several years. And we in AID are managing two presidential initiatives that contribute to increasing that trade in Africa: the Presidential Initiative to End Hunger in Africa and the African Global Competitiveness Initiative.

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MS. LISER: Just quickly on the issue of the cotton subsidies. Walter has talked about the development side of how we're working with the cotton four countries, the Western Central African cotton countries. On the trade side of it, though, what's important to note is that we are moving to try to reduce substantially all of the domestic supports and export subsidies for agricultural products. And in Hong Kong, we actually made a decision -- the ministers made a decision and it was incorporated into the declaration coming out of Hong Kong -- that whatever we do on agricultural domestic supports to reduce them, we will go further than that on cotton. And we did that because we recognize the very serious problems that the cotton farmers in Africa, not just those four but in other places as well, are facing. So you should just know that we are working with the Africans both on the development side of the cotton issue to help them be more competitive in their cotton, to address fertilizer issues, seed issues, irrigation issues, ginning, processing into apparel so they can get more value-added for their cotton and not just be the exporters of just the raw cotton, you know. So we're doing that, but we are also working on the trade side.

And whenever we come to a conclusion of the Doho round, the Africans will see also a greater reduction and a more rapid reduction of domestic supports in the cotton sector.

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