Baffled Lesotho seeks to engage with US on jeans tariffs

By Marafaele Mohloboli

MASERU (Reuters) -Lesotho scrambled to put together a delegation on Friday to head to Washington to engage with the United States on tariffs that risk wiping out nearly half of its exports, its trade minister said, in what could be a death blow to its economy.

The 50% trade tariff on the tiny southern African mountain kingdom was the highest levy on U.S. President Donald Trump's list of target economies.

Trump on Wednesday hit America's global trading partners with tariffs, upending decades of rules-based trade that campaigners have long said is exceptionally favourable to rich countries like the United States.

Lesotho's exports to the United States, mostly textiles for popular brands such as Levi's and Calvin Klein, added up to $237 million in 2024 and account for more than a tenth of its GDP.

"We never saw this coming," said Ricky Chang, director of the Nien Hsing textiles factory, which makes Levi's jeans, on the outskirts of the capital, Maseru.

The factory makes 440,000 pairs of jeans for Levi's a month, he said, as rows of workers sat at sowing machines stitching.

"It came as a shocker, an absolute disaster. We will have no choice but to lay off some workers should push come to shove," he said.

Trade Minister Mokhethi Shelile told parliament on Friday that the 45% of exports went to the United States so "the latest policy direction ... is shocking".

Shelile said that officials had already engaged the U.S. embassy "to clarify and how, why Lesotho was included in the list of ... such high reciprocal tariffs".

He also said Lesotho was assembling a a high-level delegation to the United States "to try to maintain the current market dispensation".

In the medium term, he said the kingdom would "increase efforts to export to alternative markets, such as the European Union and the Africa free continental trade area".

Trump on March 5, in an address to the U.S. Congress referred to Lesotho as a country "no one has heard of" to laughs from his audience. Lesotho's foreign minister, Lejone Mpotjoane, later said the remark was "quite insulting".

Encircled by a South African mountain range, the kingdom of 2 million people is one of the world's poorest countries, with GDP per capita of $916 in 2023, according to World Bank figures.

(Reporting by Marafaele Mohloboli in MaseruAdditional reporting by Bhargav AcharyaWriting by Tim Cocks; editing by Barbara Lewis)