‘The pressure is too much’: Lesotho’s garment workers on the frontline of Trump tariffs

Submission statement: an update on the situation in Lesotho, one of the countries that was the hardest hit by the Trump administration's FoPo and trade decisions, one year in.

Lesotho, a mountain kingdom of 2.3 million people landlocked within South Africa, is classified as a lower-middle income country where half the population works in the informal sector and depends on remittances from workers abroad (mainly in ZA) and subsistance agriculture, but has greatly benefitted from opening trade with the United States through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) by specializing in the textile industry, a sector that formally employs 36,000 people as of 2025.

But in April 2025, Donald Trump announced tariffs of 50% on Lesotho as part of his sweeping "Liberation Day" trade offensive, a catastrophic decision for the country, whose government declared a two-year "state of disaster" to unlock and allocate emergency funding to factories wrecked by the tariffs. While the tariffs were ultimately revised down to 15% (still a steep change), the decision threw Lesotho's garment factories into uncertainty and disarray, leading to thousands of layoffs, a slide back into poverty for thousands of families, and the halving of GDP growth projections for the next 2-3 years.

Lesotho is now seeking to diversify its exports, notably to South Africa, but the Trump administration's antagonization of the country and its exclusion from the Agoa scheme – which expired during the government shutdown in October 2025 and is still pending approval for extension by the Senate as of January 2026 – risks throwing Lesotho into further economic crisis, deepened by USAID cuts in a country where nearly a quarter of the adult population is affected by HIV/AIDS.