Côte d’Ivoire officials met with the State Department in Washington this week to lobby for greater American agricultural imports to Francophone West Africa’s largest economy.
Sidi Tiémoko Touré, the Ivorian minister for animal and fisheries resources, told Semafor that his country — one of the continent’s largest importers of pork from nations such as Brazil — could be buying more regularly from the US. “There is a large opportunity in our country for US businesses to export to us,” he said.
The discussions come against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s plans to impose higher tariffs on countries with which the US has trade imbalances. Touré, however, stressed that Côte d’Ivoire had already been working on creating greater incentives for more Anglophone businesses to invest and trade with it even before Washington’s tariffs’ push.
The US and Côte d’Ivoire traded around $1.6 billion in goods last year, mostly Ivorian agricultural products such as cocoa and cashew nuts exported to the US. Most of the Ivorian exports would have qualified under the AGOA preferential trade agreement, with no tariffs.
