CAPE TOWN, South Africa — (AP) — 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 aluminum.
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.
Von der Leyen's visit also reemphasized the EU's support for South Africa's presidency of the Group of 20 leading rich and developing nations this year, another area where the U.S. has criticized South Africa while boycotting some early G20 meetings.
South Africa hopes to use its leadership of the group to make progress on help for poor countries, especially on debt relief and more financing to mitigate the impact of climate change.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed some of those priorities for the G20 and skipped a foreign ministers meeting of the group in South Africa last month. He also said that he wouldn't attend the main G20 summit in Johannesburg in November, indicating that the U.S. would give little attention to attempts at international cooperation through the bloc, which includes 19 of the world's major economies, the EU and the African Union.
The EU said that the vast majority of the new investment in South Africa — $4.7 billion out of the $5.1 billion — would be to help South Africa transition from its coal-based economy to greener energy supplies.
That new pledge came a week after the U.S. withdrew from an agreement to give funding to South Africa and two other developing nations to help them transition to clean energy sources. The EU has also pledged money to that Just Energy Transition Partnership and said that it's still committed to the program.
“We know that others are withdrawing so we want to be very clear with our support," von der Leyen said. "We are doubling down and we are here to stay.”
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