US ambassador Patrick Gaspard’s final message to SA: grab trade relations with both hands
Passionate about SA, the US envoy says long-term, earnest plans must be made beyond Agoa, writes Hilary Joffe
Patrick Gaspard says his parents did not go into so much debt to send him to university just so that he could become an expert on South African poultry. Having served three years and three months as the US ambassador to SA, Gaspard leaves at the end of this year ahead of the change of administration in the US, and he is forthright about his exasperation at having had to spend so much of his time here fighting about chickens. The long stand-off over SA’s refusal to allow imports of US chicken, beef and pork that led to the US threatening to block SA’s duty-free access to US markets under the newly extended African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), eventually ended well earlier this year, when SA agreed to let the chicken in and its preferential access to US markets was saved.Gaspard is just as forthright about his passion for the beauty and people of SA, which he first visited 25 years ago, and his belief in SA’s potential to prosper in the longer term, and his firm view that "Afric...
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