Western Cape exports to the United States fell by R2.8 billion in 2025, and by nearly R7 billion on the latest rolling twelve-month figures, as tariffs and a diplomatic freeze hit the province’s farmers, wine makers and boat builders.
The slump has landed hardest on the agricultural and agro-processing lines that the Democratic Alliance’s provincial government has long treated as its growth story, even as its own leaders have spent years publicly attacking the administration now setting the terms of access to that market.
Merchandise exports from the Western Cape to the US dropped 16.2 percent in calendar 2025, from R17.31 billion to R14.51 billion, according to figures cited by Premier Alan Winde and Business Day. The United States fell from the province’s second-largest export market to its fourth. The province still accounts for more than half of South Africa’s agricultural and processed-agricultural shipments to America.
More recent data, supplied to the Cape Argus by the Premier’s Office and the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism and drawn from SARS and Quantec, show a sharper break. US-bound exports fell from R16.89 billion in the twelve months to July 2025 to R10.02 billion in the twelve months to July 2026, a decline of about R6.87 billion, or 41 percent.
The product lines tell the story. Fruit juice collapsed 86 percent, from R952.9 million to R136.7 million. Grapes fell 79 percent, from R444.2 million to R91.1 million. Wine dropped 38 percent, from R603.1 million to R371.5 million. Citrus, the province’s largest US agricultural line and partly shielded by exemptions, still fell 17 percent, from R2.19 billion to R1.82 billion. Yacht and vessel exports, a niche Cape industry that uses a large share of American components, more than halved, from R1.4 billion to R627.6 million.
Washington imposed a 30 percent tariff on affected South African goods in August 2025, after a temporary lapse in African Growth and Opportunity Act benefits. AGOA has since been extended to the end of 2028, but it is not yet clear whether South Africa will remain a beneficiary. After the US Supreme Court struck down the emergency tariff regime in February 2026, duties were revised; some goods, including fresh oranges, have been exempted. Exporters Western Cape chair Terry Gale has warned that the diplomatic standoff itself carries a cost, and that the slide will worsen if it is not resolved.
That standoff did not begin in a vacuum. In April 2026, Cape Town mayor and DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis told Newzroom Afrika he was “no fan of MAGA and no fan of Mr Trump whatsoever,” that Trump had “put the world in a very dangerous place,” and that “in many ways, he’s quite reprehensible actually.” He said he held “no candle whatsoever for that policy and that administration.” Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder called the remarks alarming and said they would not go unnoticed in Washington.
Winde has been more careful in public since the tariffs landed. He has called the duties harsh, said the province had been “let down and handed a bad situation,” and urged Pretoria to “get the diplomacy right.” In November 2024, however, News24 reported him telling an FW de Klerk Foundation audience that Trump supporters, like MK Party supporters, “may appall you.” Critics also say sharper posts from his account during Trump’s first term have since disappeared. Whether or not those posts can still be produced, the on-the-record record is plain enough: the party that governs the province most dependent on the American market has treated hostility to that market’s government as a cost-free gesture.
It has not been cost-free. Citrus took decades to build as a US line. Wine, grapes and juice cannot be switched to new buyers in a season. Diversification into the rest of Africa has offset some citrus volumes, and total Western Cape exports to all markets are still up. That does not replace a high-value, hard-currency customer. The province’s own numbers show what happens when a trading relationship built over years is treated, in Pretoria and in the DA’s own leadership, as a stage for insult rather than a market to be kept open.
