The day after Donald Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, Lesotho’s garment workers feared for their jobs.
Last year, Lesotho sent about 20% of its $1.1bn (£845m) of exports to the US, most of it clothing, as well as diamonds, under a continent-wide trade agreement meant to help African countries’ development via tariff-free exports.
Now, all that is at risk, after the US president imposed a 50% tariff on the impoverished landlocked country, which he claimed last month “nobody had ever heard of”.
Makhotso Moeti migrated to Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, from the rural centre of the tiny mountainous kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa. “Factory work is the only job I’ve known for many years,” she said, attaching a label to Gap clothing. “If the factories shut down, I won’t have many options left. I’ll be forced to return home to the very poverty I thought I had escaped when I moved to the city.”
On Wednesday, Trump unveiled what he claimed were “reciprocal” tariffs, overturning decades of global trade policy.
The tariff rates, which are due to come into force on 9 April, range from 10% to 50% and were calculated with what economists labelled an “idiotic” formula, penalising countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US relative to their imports from the US.
Dr Ratjomose Machema, a lecturer in economics at the National University of Lesotho, said: “I don’t understand how this is a reciprocal tariff because we really don’t charge that much in tariffs.”
Lesotho, which has a population of 2.3 million, was hit with the highest rate. In Africa, it was followed by vanilla exporter Madagascar with a tariff of 47%, diamond producer Botswana on 37%, oil-rich Angola with 32%, and the continent’s most industrialised economy, South Africa, on 30%.
Like the hard-hit, south-east Asian economies, the poor majority in these countries cannot afford expensive American products. In recent decades, China has overtaken western countries to become the largest trading partner of most African countries.
According to the African Growth and Opportunities Act (Agoa) US data portal, Lesotho exported $237m of goods last year to the US and imported $2.8m, mostly clothing and diamonds. Agoa, which has allowed tariff-free access to the US market for thousands of product types since 2000, created a thriving garment industry, accounting for about 20% of GDP.
There are about 30,000 garment workers in Lesotho, mostly women, with 12,000 making clothes for US brands including Levi’s, Calvin Klein and Walmart in Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned factories. While most of the jobs pay the monthly minimum wage of $146-$163, they are still highly sought after in the poor, largely informal economy.
In Madagascar, which has a population of about 32 million, Agoa has also nurtured a significant garment sector, which employs about 180,000 people in a country where GDP per head is just $575. In 2024, the island nation exported $733m of goods to the US, with clothing the top export, followed by vanilla.
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Ketakandriana Rafitoson, a political science researcher at the Catholic University of Madagascar, said: “The textile and apparel sector is really a cornerstone of Madagascar’s economy … [Tariffs] will have a drastic effect on the country.”
The future of Agoa, which will expire in September if it isn’t renewed by the US Congress, was already looking precarious before Trump’s announcement.
Lesotho’s trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile, said officials, who had been preparing to travel to the US to ask for an Agoa extension, would argue that the tariff calculations didn’t include digital services from US companies such as Android and Microsoft.
He added: “That being said, we recognise that we cannot rely solely on the American market.”
A fact sheet published by the White House to accompany Trump’s tariff announcement said: “Today’s action simply asks other countries to treat us like we treat them. It’s the golden rule for our golden age.”
In Lesotho, Nthabiseng Khalele, a garment worker sheltering from the rain after a long day in the factory, said: “My hope and wish is that our prime minister could somehow reach out to President Trump and ask him to at least show some compassion for Lesotho. If we lose our jobs here, I’m almost certain that many of us will end up sleeping on empty stomachs.”
