The move takes a tough blow to the little poor state that Trump has chuckled as a place where no one has heard of.
The Trump administration has imposed a 50% harsh tariff on Lesotho, a small, poor African nation of 2 million.
The measure will seriously hurt Lesotho’s economy. This relies heavily on the modest export of $2 billion in gross domestic product (GDP).
President Donald Trump, who laughed at Lesotho last month as a country that “no one has ever heard of” before, announced it as part of a series of “mutual tariffs” sets laid out on Thursday.
Trump’s new tariffs are calculated based on the US trade deficit with countries and divided by the total value of imports from that country. As a result, small economies, such as Lesotho and Madagascar, with limited imports from the US, were hit hardest.
Lesotho’s trade surplus with the US is driven primarily by exports of diamonds and textiles, including Levi’s jeans. According to Oxford Economics, exports to the US totaled $237 million in 2024, accounting for more than 10% of GDP.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has claimed that Lesotho is leviing 99% tariffs on US goods.
The high collection of Lesotho and other African countries marks the end of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade agreement, which is supposed to help African economies develop through priority access to the US market, trade experts said.
It also exacerbated the pain after Trump’s administration dismantled the continent’s leading aid provider, the United States Organization for International Development (USAID).
Thabo Qhesi, an independent economic analyst based in Maseru, said that US tariffs on Lesotho were ” [country’s] The largest private employer, the textiles and apparel sector.
“If factory closures occur, the industry will die and have a multiplier effect,” Qhesi says. “That’s why Lesotho is dead.”
The Lesotho government did not immediately comment on trade tariffs. However, the Foreign Minister told Reuters last month that countries with one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world felt the impact of aid cuts as their health sector relied on them.
Source link
