New York -- The U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of AGOA II last Friday is the first step in bolstering the Africa trade bill, Uganda’s ambassador to the U.S. Edith Ssempala told The Monitor.

AGOA II doubled the scale of phased-in quotas of textiles and apparel for countries eligible under the African Growth and Opportunities Act. Ssempala said the next step is to gain passage of a new bill which would promote the export of agricultural products from African nations to the U.S. "Success generates more success," Ssempala said of her philosophy regarding AGOA.

She sees AGOA II as a vindication of her strategy regarding trade with the U.S. Critics of the first AGOA, passed last year, said it was not good enough. But Ssempala and her allies disagreed. "We thought it was a question of strategy," she said. "We needed to enter the door, we needed to make a breakthrough."

The next targeted breakthrough, for Ssempala, is the inclusion of agricultural products in the AGOA trade scheme. "Agricultural products are of particular interest to us because Uganda is an agricultural country," Ssempala said.

Until she achieves that objective, though, Uganda will focus on selling its attractive long-staple cotton. The embassy has requested a shipment of samples of the cotton to the U.S., which Ssempala plans to use to convince several companies to invest in Uganda’s cotton industry. She has contacted the companies but is still in the preliminary negotiation stages, so she would not identify them. Her goal is to convince them to invest in the apparel industry, to create apparel-producing jobs in Uganda.