The tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho has been hit with a 50% reciprocal trade tariff by U.S. President Donald Trump, the highest levy for any single state.
Lesotho, which Trump had ridiculed in March as a country “nobody has ever heard of”, is a poor and landlocked country with a gross domestic product of just over $2 billion.
It has a large trade surplus with the United States, mostly made up of diamonds and textiles, including Levi’s jeans.
Its exports to the United States – which in 2024 totalled $237 million – account for over 10 percent of GDP, Oxford Economics said.
Trump on Wednesday (April 2) imposed sweeping new reciprocal tariffs on global trading partners, upending decades of rules-based trade and threatening cost increases for consumers.
Trump said the “reciprocal” tariffs were a response to duties and other non-tariff barriers put on U.S. goods. Lesotho charges 99% tariffs on American goods, according to the U.S. administration.
In Africa, the move signalled the end of the AGOA trade deal that was supposed to help African economies develop through preferential access to U.S. markets, trade experts said.
It also compounded the pain after Trump’s administration dismantled USAID, the government agency that was a major supplier of aid to the continent.
“The 50% reciprocal tariff introduced by the U.S. government is going to kill the textile and apparel sector in Lesotho,” Thabo Qhesi, a Maseru-based independent economic analyst, told Reuters.
The resulting tariff equals half the ratio between the two, meaning countries import only small quantities of U.S. goods, such as Lesotho and Madagascar, have been hit with more punitive tariffs than much richer countries.
One corn vendor in Maseru, Sekhoane Masokela, saw Trump’s announcement as a reason to seek out new markets.
“His (Trump’s) is not the only country, so he is giving us an opportunity to cut ties with him and look for other countries. It is evident that he no longer wants anything to do with us,” Masokela said.