EU announces $5B investment in South Africa as Trump threatens more tariffs on European products

By Associated Press

CAPE TOWN: European Union leaders announced 4.7 billion euros ($5.1 billion) in investments in South Africa on Thursday to support green energy and vaccine production, and agreed to start talks on a “new generation” of trade deals with the African country.

In their first bilateral summit in seven years, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa all spoke of the need to reassert the principle of international cooperation.

Their message stood in contrast to, and was seemingly driven by, the Trump administration’s confrontational foreign policy and trade tariffs. Meanwhile, Trump threatened in a social media post to impose a 200% tariff on European wine, Champagne and spirits in an escalation of a trade war with the EU that started with him putting new duties on steel and aluminium.

In their meeting at the South African leader’s Cape Town office, von der Leyen said Europe was looking to deepen its trade relationship with South Africa, Africa’s most advanced economy and already the EU’s largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa.

“We want to strengthen and diversify our supply chains but we want to do it in cooperation with you,” von der Leyen said, sitting alongside Ramaphosa. She called it a new chapter in their relations.

Ramaphosa said the summit came at a time of rising “economic nationalism.”

Both the EU and South Africa have felt the impact of Trump in the first months of his second term in office.

South Africa has been singled out for sanctions by the Trump administration over some domestic and foreign policies that the U.S. leader has cast as anti-American.

Trump issued an executive order last month cutting all U.S. funding to South Africa, accusing it of a human rights violation against a white minority group in the country, and of supporting some “bad actors” in the world like the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran.