In Senegal, Institut Pasteur, the renowned French biomedical research institute specializing in vaccines and microbiology, had been humming too — with precision freezers, clean rooms, and technicians dreaming in genomes.
Across the continent in Kenya, biotech startups were inching toward scale, lifted by donor-backed pilot programs, small-batch diagnostics orders, and exploratory dialogues with foreign investors. That rhythm is now beginning to falter. Many of these programs are hobbled or on hold.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, few foresaw that his trade hammer would strike the Global South harder than it would China. But strike it did — swiftly, broadly, and with tariffs so blunt that even development experts used to disappointment were stunned.
A baseline 10 percent tariff now applies to nearly all imports into the United States, with Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and other countries slapped with punitive rates of up to 50 percent under a vague rubric of “reciprocity.” Among those hit hardest: South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, Botswana, Angola and even Lesotho — once celebrated as a garment-export miracle under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The impact on the just-budding biotech sector could be catastrophic.
Pillars pulled from beneath
For years, American programs such as AGOA and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) offered low- and middle-income countries a seat at the global table — not out of charity, but strategy. These frameworks did not fund African biotech directly, but they carved out space for legitimacy, trade-linked investment, and policy ambition to quietly grow. Out of that scaffolding, Africa began to rise as a biotech partner, not merely an aid recipient.
Africa began to rise as a biotech partner, and not merely an aid recipient. In Dakar, in Cape Town, in Kigali, and in Nairobi, laboratories began to hum like factories. Diagnostic firms took shape. Vaccine fill-finish lines sprouted. And crucially, young scientists stopped looking only outward because the future was, for once, at home.
South Africa, which is one of Africa’s most mature pharmaceutical players, faces a 30 percent reciprocal tariff. This means that every biotech export into the U.S. becomes uncompetitive on arrival. Madagascar and Mauritius face 40 percent-plus levies. Inexplicably, Lesotho, whose modest gains in medical devices once signaled biotech potential, faces 50 percent tariffs that threaten to gut its industrial backbone.
Tariffs like these do not just slow trade; they shatter trust. And they undermine health care advances in vulnerable countries across Africa.
Tech transfer on ice
Many Global South biotech advances were born through painstaking partnerships. U.S.-based pharma firms transferred machinery and molecular know-how to regional manufacturers. CRISPR trials began to consider African genomes. Biosimilar insulin and monoclonal antibodies were inching toward production in India and Brazil — and, with enough will, in Africa too. Now, those pathways are being sealed off.
U.S. pharmaceutical companies, driven by risk aversion and bottom lines, are backing out of joint ventures. Contracts for co-development have been paused. Reagent shipments have slowed. Technology transfer agreements are being redrafted or abandoned.
Nearly 90% of FDA‑approved biotech products depend on imported components, and a recent survey by BIO, the global biotechnology association, found 50% of U.S. biotech firms must delay or cancel partnerships in tariff‑impacted countries. Reagent shipments from Europe and China are already slowing, while anecdotal reports from lab technicians highlight cost increases for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and kits, prompting companies to pause co‑development deals and abandon technology‑transfer agreements.
This is not because science failed. It is because protectionism rewrote the rules mid-game.
India and Brazil feel the squeeze
This squeeze is not confined to Africa. India-based vaccine exporters are navigating rising uncertainty as new U.S. tariffs inject risk into long-standing contracts. The CEO of the global pharmaceutical company Cipla warned that “tariffs should not dictate” Indian drugmakers’ decisions, underscoring a growing anxiety across the sector as they brace for 25 percent U.S. duties on pharmaceutical imports.
Latin America’s biotech ambitions are now entwined with geopolitics. Brazilian leaders have publicly embraced a strategic pivot toward China and the EU, not just for agricultural exports, but for high-value sectors including life sciences. President Lula’s May 2025 visit to Beijing underscored the shift, forging multiple deals and accelerating Chinese investments in sectors from rail lines to farm export infrastructure, explicitly framed as a countermeasure to U.S. tariff “chaos” precipitated by Trump’s policies.
Meanwhile, regional trade blocs are actively diversifying. A December 2024 Reuters analysis highlighted that Mercosur is expediting free-trade agreements with the EU, EFTA, UAE, and Singapore, directly citing the threat of U.S. tariffs as a driving factor.
In the U.S., importers are already looking elsewhere — to domestic options, Europe, and other more “politically stable” jurisdictions. Ironically, this sometimes means higher costs for American health agencies, undermining the very efficiencies Trump’s policies claim to defend.
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The pivot to China
A new courtship is underway, and China is writing the love letters.
Across the Global South, Beijing is moving quickly to fill the vacuum. Its Belt and Road biotech initiatives are no longer just memoranda. Chinese firms are building turnkey labs and showcasing their prowess in West Africa. They are offering low-interest equipment financing in Lusaka and Abidjan. They are training lab technicians in Mandarin, not English.
What Washington seems to have forgotten, China remembers clearly: trade is not merely commerce, it is influence. By squeezing out the Global South with tariffs, the U.S. is ceding a generation of scientific allegiance to Beijing.
America’s moral paradox
The contradiction is hard to swallow. Global AIDS research and preparedness have been gutted. The same country that funds the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched in 2003 by President Bush, supports the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and drives pandemic preparedness through USAID and the CDC, is now walling off the very economies it once uplifted.
This is not just poor optics. It is a geopolitical miscalculation. Africa’s Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM) needs cross-border supply chains. Latin America’s Mercosur biotech networks, launched in 2005, depend on export flexibility. India and Brazil anchor affordable medicine production for dozens of low-income countries.
High and apparently randomly applied tariffs unravel this intricate web — making regional cooperation more difficult, and duplicative capacity more expensive. At a time when climate shocks and emerging pandemics demand coordinated innovation, Trump’s tariffs push nations toward isolation, and worse, toward incompatible systems of regulation, standards, and trust.
A door that could stay closed
The Trump administration has signaled that these tariffs are not temporary. While he has suspended country-specific reciprocal tariffs across Africa and elsewhere, the universal 10% baseline tariff remains in force. They will remain, he has said, until trade imbalances are corrected — a phrase as amorphous as it is menacing.
But trade imbalance is not something Rwanda can fix overnight. Nor can Madagascar, or Lesotho, or any African, South Asian or Latin American country. Many Global South economies are import-heavy because their industrial bases are young. Penalizing them for this fact is like blaming a patient for their diagnosis.
There are solutions. Targeted exemptions for health goods. Renewed AGOA and GSP frameworks with biotech carve-outs. A recommitment to co-development, not just paternalism. But none of this will happen on its own. It will take advocacy and urgency.
Because the window for building resilient, sovereign biotech systems in the Global South is now. Not next decade. Not when Washington feels ready. Now.
Science moves whether politics catches up or not. If Global South countries are cut off from American partnerships, they will not stand idle. They will pursue new allies; in fact, that’s happening already. They will shift their regulatory alignments. They will rewrite their strategic maps.
Biotech does not wait
Science moves whether politics catches up or not. If Global South countries are cut off from American partnerships, they will not stand idle. They will pursue new allies; in fact, that’s happening already. They will shift their regulatory alignments. They will rewrite their strategic maps.
The U.S., meanwhile, may find that it has lost something far more valuable than trade surplus: credibility, influence, and a seat at the next table where a significant part of the future of biotech is being negotiated.
In Kampala, in Kigali, in Recife, and in Pune, dreams are not dead. But they are bruised. If the tariffs remain, dreamers and doers will look East.
Dr. Joseph Maina is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work integrates diverse disciplines including macro-ecology, climate science, oceanography, remote sensing, hydrology, fisheries management, and decision science.
