South Africa\u2019s government said it would be ill-considered and counterproductive to rush into imposing reciprocal tariffs on imports from the US after Washington hit it with punitive charges.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere are all sorts of knee-jerk reactions to the announcements made\u201d about the tariffs, Parks Tau, South Africa\u2019s trade minister, told reporters on Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a risky thing to do to simply decide that we\u2019re now going to impose reciprocal tariffs. I think it is a race to the bottom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
US President Donald Trump earlier week announced \u201creciprocal\u201d tariffs on imports from across the world after accusing its trading partners of having exploited its openness to free trade while protecting their own economies from fair competition to the detriment of US manufacturers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It will place a flat duty of 10% on a range of goods arriving from abroad, with higher charges on imports from about 60 countries \u2014 including South Africa, which will incur a 31% levy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Relations between South Africa and its second-largest trading partner have soured since Trump accused the southern African nation of unlawfully seizing land from the White minority. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The South African authorities haven\u2019t confiscated any private land since apartheid ended in 1994.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSouth Africa remains committed to a mutually beneficial trade relationship with the United States,\u201d but punitive tariffs \u201care a concern and serve as a barrier of trade,\u201d International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola said at Friday\u2019s briefing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have in excess of 600 US companies that are in South Africa \u2014 we\u2019re not going to wake up one day and say we want to target US companies, it would be counterproductive,\u201d Tau said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not in our interest as a country and as an economy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South Africa\u2019s government said it would be ill-considered and counterproductive to rush into imposing reciprocal tariffs on imports from the US after Washington hit it with punitive charges.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":807494,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[10849,1998,19567],"class_list":["post-819739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-donald-trump","tag-parks-tau","tag-ronald-lamola"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819741,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819739\/revisions\/819741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}