By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
@WhiteHouse.
The Trump administration has imposed a steep 50 percent tariff on Lesotho, a small, impoverished African nation of two million people – the highest tariff levied on any country.
The measure delivers a severe blow to Lesotho’s economy, which relies heavily on exports for its modest $2bn gross domestic product (GDP).
United States President Donald Trump, who mocked Lesotho last month as a country “nobody has ever heard of”, announced it as part of a sweeping set of “reciprocal tariffs” laid out on Thursday.
Trump’s new tariffs were calculated based on the US trade deficit with each country, divided by the total value of imports from that nation. As a result, smaller economies with limited imports from the US – such as Lesotho and Madagascar – were hit hardest.
Lesotho’s trade surplus with the US is largely driven by diamond and textile exports, including Levi’s jeans. In 2024, its exports to the US totalled $237m, accounting for more than 10 percent of its GDP, according to Oxford Economics.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration claims Lesotho imposes a 99 percent tariff on US goods.
“We need to urgently travel to the U.S. to engage with its executives and plead our case,” Trade Minister Mokhethi Shelile told reporters Thursday. “My biggest concern was the immediate closure of factories and job losses.”
“There are 11 factories in the country, most of which export goods to the U.S. and provide employment to 12,000 workers,” Shelile said. “Goods currently in production will be affected by these tariffs and will not be exported to the U.S.”
He said he’d asked factories to continue operating “while we work on solutions,” and added that the U.S. action showed his country needed to “diversify” its trade relationships, which he said it had already started exploring.
We cannot rely solely on the U.S.,” he said. “While this transition will take time, the process is already underway.”
The high levies on Lesotho and other African states signalled the end of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal that was supposed to help African economies develop through preferential access to US markets, trade experts said.
In 2018, the World Bank modelled a scenario where Lesotho experienced the sudden loss of Agoa privileges and found that the impact would “reach 1% of GDP” within two years. The report concluded that impact on welfare would be “dramatic.”
Agoa has long been viewed as an important tool of US soft power, especially in countering the growing influence of China and Russia in Africa.
Neighbouring South Africa, which exports metals and cars to the US, believes this spells the end of Agoa.
“The reciprocal tariffs effectively nullify the preferences that sub-Saharan Africa countries enjoy under Agoa,” foreign and trade ministers said in a joint statement on Friday.
It also compounded the pain after Trump’s administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major aid provider to the continent.
Aljazeera contributed to this report.